Titan King: Ascension of the Giant Chapter 1700 Piercing the Void

"Come on, then!"

The roar tore loose from Orion's chest. Heart locked to will, will to spirit, spirit to the blood in his veins—this was the strength he'd banked from his last turn inward, every hard-won hour of looking deep into himself.

It began in the heart and ended at the point of the trident. A single thrust, plain as that, driven straight down and in, a dragon breaking from the deep to strike. Nothing more than a thrust—and behind it lay every year he'd ever spent.

"This is—"

Something monstrous gathered across the three prongs. For one instant the heavens turned over: rivers of stars ran backward, time folded, space crushed inward.

The shadow hadn't so much as moved, and already Commander and Kaidric—neither of whom had lifted a finger—felt the weight of it.

Bending every force to his own hand. Light flickered through Commander's eyes and was gone. The boy worked that out alone? There was a trace of his own blade in that strike. Not pure enough yet. But it was there.

"That aura." Kaidric's hackles rose. "Don't tell me we've got another Dawnblade."

Where Commander saw promise, Kaidric saw something else. Danger. Death.

And Orion's enemy felt it too.

"Realm of Shadows—descend!"

The shadow tore open a pocket of pure dark, folded it shut around itself, and sent it hurtling at Orion as a black sphere no eye could see into.

On the wall of Blackstone City, Leonidas watched it swallow the light and thought of nothing so much as a black hole devouring the world. Orion was the light. The enemy was the dark that ate it.

Can he win?

For the first time, Leonidas wasn't sure.

"Quit gawking." Alexander held up better—he was watching too, but his eyes swept the whole field. "There are demigods buried in that swarm coming for the wall. We've got our own work."

Whether Orion and Commander could put their opponents down was beside the point. Until they did, neither Bronze City nor Blackstone City could be allowed to fall. That was the whole reason he and Leonidas had come down—to take the weight off. And Commander's war-citadel was nearly grounded; nothing could be permitted to disturb the landing.

High overhead, the duel ground to a standstill.

"Tsk. That's a technique only the truly strong ever wield." The shadow's voice slid out, amused. "Pity you're no sixth-stage peak. You'll never wring the real force out of it."

When the dark and the trident first met, the shadow had taken Orion's measure—ordinary sixth stage, a long way short of an apex. The pocket would hold him. So it needled him, fishing for a crack in his nerve.

What it didn't understand: with heart, will, and spirit fused into one, Orion was the attack. There was no line left between him and the trident in his fist. Every scrap of him bent to a single end—tear the darkness open.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

Nothing moved in him but the drive to spend everything and break the thing in front of him. His will became a lance of light that shredded all it touched, ranging wild through the dark. Heaven and earth turned over. Like a plow through soil, the pocket took the full pour of his strength.

—

"A sort like you couldn't survive a single cut of mine."

Commander drew his focus back off Orion and looked his own opponent over, deciding the little flicker of interest he'd felt had been a lot of fuss over nothing. Sixth-stage powers who hadn't even called up a Divine Vessel—killing them proved nothing.

"We're all demigods here. Who do you think you're frightening?"

"You ought to understand something," Commander said. "We're all being played, every one of us. There's a third party tucked away behind all this, watching for the show."

Yet peak power to peak power, his words couldn't bend the shadow's will. It was only the second-strongest of the Boundless Expanse—but the gap to the first ran thin.

"Doesn't matter to me," Commander went on. "Titanion Realm is a newborn Ascendant Plane. Empty. Worth nothing. But you've broken cover. You let the trail of the Divine Mantle slip. The real reckoning is coming for you, not us."

It was true—and it was a weapon. Words driven straight into the heart's weak point, and they detonated in all three shadows like a bolt from a clear sky. Still locked against Orion, the Lord of the Boundless Expanse couldn't stop the tremor that ran through him.

So. The thing we meant to keep hidden was laid bare long ago.

Inside the dark, Orion caught the flaw opening in the shadow's spirit. He roared and drove harder, faster.

The dimension, already strained to breaking, began to shake. Crack after crack opened across the false sky, each one cut by the trident. The whole pocket had gone unstable.

"Surprised? Frightened?" Commander's mouth ticked up, and his reverse draw came a shade quicker. Behind him hung the faint shape of a blade, the killing intent on it almost solid. "You'd call yourself strong, standing in front of me?"

The sneer dropped from his face all at once, as if another man had stepped into his skin—cold, looming, remote as something that had never drawn a mortal breath.

A low hum.

The blade fell, and the dark broke.

The shadow guttered into nothing. One stroke, its cold light spanning nineteen lands, its glare blazing ten thousand miles—and a torrent of World Essence came spiraling back, pouring down into Blackstone City for the Wishing Tree to drink.

"This is an Ascendant Plane. It'll bear a Divine Vessel or two. You didn't have the nerve to bring yours—so spare me the act."

He'd put the enemy down and taken the Essence that scattered off the corpse; Commander allowed himself a thread of satisfaction. His own fight finished, he cast a glance toward Orion's and Kaidric's quarters of the field, then held where he stood and waited.

"Break."

A shaft of red light split the void and ripped down the curtain of dark that had swallowed the sky. Shards of shattered space scattered like falling stars.

"Impossible—"

With the dimension broken, the black hole sheathing the Lord of the Boundless Expanse guttered low. The trident took him through the chest, and cracks spidered out from the wound above his heart, terrible to look at.

He moved to flee and found his body gone slow and heavy, mired as if in a bog, every reaction lagging a beat behind. The binding had come folded into Orion's strike. There was no slipping it.

Just as he braced for the avatar to come apart, the force pinning him began to ebb—and the trident buried in him, and Orion behind it, were already streaking back and away.

An opening—and gone.

As an apex power, the Lord grasped it in a single beat. A breath ago, when Orion had burned through the last of himself—that had been the window. The one clean chance to put him in the ground. And it was already behind them both.

"You're not as weak as I took you for."

Orion pulled clear, and the force knotted through the Lord's chest unwound with him. A shudder ran the length of the avatar; then the cracks sealed, the wound closed, and nothing remained to say he'd ever been touched.