The Extra's Rise - Chapter 950
950: Hellflame Emperor (2) 950: Hellflame Emperor (2) Elara’s name on the marble was the last human thing between us.
The air was thick with three years of silence, grief, and something harder.
“Not here,” I said, my voice low.
Jack didn’t look away from the stone.
“Never here.” We both turned.
I reached out and opened a clean path through Ouroboros, a short, sharp cut through space with no flourishes.
I stepped through first, the damp earth of the Avalon graveyard vanishing from under my feet.
As I passed through the threshold, I sent out the courtesy pings to the five districts, a simple matter of protocol.
Each message was one line: Training area request.
Skeld Wastes.
Do not approach.
Two replies came back almost instantly.
North: Corridor clear.
West: Don’t die without me watching.
-J.
I smiled faintly at Jessica’s reply.
I landed on powder-gray rock under a sky the color of cold iron.
The wind scraped across the ground like old sandpaper, carrying tiny particles of glass.
No towns.
No shrines.
No life.
Just the Skeld Wastes-flat shelves of dark basalt where the world had forgotten to put a name.
It was an honest place for what was to come.
Jack stepped out of the portal behind me, and the world grew heavier.
High Radiant wasn’t just more mana.
It was weight.
It was the mark of a Gate that had opened and left a permanent shape on the soul.
His presence settled like a second horizon, sketched in lines of iron and chalk.
A strange, hungry heat crowded around him, not glowing, just… deciding.
He flexed his left hand.
Over his palm, a flicker of wrong-colored energy bloomed.
I watched as dust motes, caught in the wind, simply ceased to exist as they neared it.
Not repelled.
Not burned.
Just gone.
Their path, their outcome, had been consumed.
So this was his answer.
Not Grey, which writes where things can touch.
This Ember of his wrote which outcomes were allowed to survive.
“You’re stronger than Reverian ever was,” I said.
There was no point in lying to myself.
“Good,” Jack said, his voice a low rumble.
“I trained for you, not him.” Valeria warmed at my hip, her presence a familiar comfort.
No stages, she murmured in my mind.
This ground is honest.
Do your work.
I lifted my left hand and called the quiet I share with Luna.
“Lucent Harmony.” A cool stillness spread from me, a soft wave of order.
The petty chaos of the wind eased.
The ground agreed to stay solid.
It was a small courtesy for the world, not for him.
For myself, I brought the sword laws I had practiced until they lived in my muscles, the nine-circle circuits humming under my skin, and Valeria’s perfect, simple truth in my hand.
No Grey.
Not yet.
“Ready?” I asked.
Jack’s eyes were raw, but for the first time in years, they were steady.
“I have been for three years.” He moved first.
His new power didn’t come as a clumsy fireball.
It was a thin, precise ribbon of black energy, coiling for my ankle like a tripwire laid by a spiteful god.
I stepped and cut-first truth, no bounce, a clean bite meant to sever it.
My blade met nothing.
The Ember didn’t block or dodge.
It simply enforced a reality where my cut missed.
My blade slid a hair off its mark, the world itself pretending my decision had never happened.
Interesting.
It doesn’t fight, it just says no.
I didn’t try to force it.
I made my truth smaller.
I narrowed my intent from a universal law to a personal one, a tight bubble of decision around my own hand.
Valeria adjusted her balance on my palm like a cat finding a better perch.
The second cut took.
The ribbon snapped with the faint sound of a string breaking in another room.
Jack was already on me, faster than I remembered, his movements carrying the heavy certainty of his new rank.
He threw a cross-cut, his hands wreathed in the old Nirvana and Abyssal flames, but now they were braided together, with that new, hungry power inked through them like dark handwriting.
I met his strike with a parry.
I felt my counter-attack, the one my body had already planned to execute, try to soften.
His Ember was reaching into the decision inside my swing-deflect and return-and trying to turn it into deflect and stop.
I let the return die.
Mid-nerve, I abandoned the technique I had practiced ten thousand times and chose a shorter line.
No flourish, no second act.
He was expecting the elegant finish.
I gave him a new, ugly start.
The edge of my blade kissed his wrist.
It didn’t draw blood-his skin was reinforced with that same energy, thin as glass-but he felt it.
“Good,” he said, and it was a mix of grief and approval.
He spread his fingers and wrote a circle of Requiem on the ground around us.
Flames that were not flames opened like black petals.
It wasn’t heat they radiated, but edits.
A quiet declaration that, inside this space, certain things no longer happened.
The wind didn’t pick up where it should.
Pebbles didn’t bounce when they landed.
The world had stopped doing its small chores.
I anchored the Lucent Harmony under my own feet.
If his Ember burns outcomes, I will not promise any.
No complex footwork that ends at a pre-planned spot.
Just steps that keep choosing while they happen.
We exchanged a dozen near-hits and near-misses.
Every time I began a technique, his Ember dipped a hand into the ending and tried to spoil it.
Every time he tried to build a cage, I refused to treat it as fate and instead cut the first bar he laid down.
My sword laws-first bite, shortest line, carry through, exit clean-didn’t break.
They just had to learn to change their shape mid-syllable.
Then he showed me what High Radiant stamina truly meant.
He didn’t throw bigger power.
He held it longer.
Where my circuits were humming at the edge of comfort, his took more and asked for seconds.
A double spiral of white and violet fire, wrapped in that outcome-eating ink, came down from above like a collar meant to close on my neck.
I lifted Valeria to guard and reached for a Lightning Step, a trick that turns distance into a polite suggestion.
The Ember touched the place I chose to land and wrote not there.
My step faltered, dropping me two feet short of my intention.
He was already there to meet me.
His fist moved like a piston.
I rolled with the impact, feeding the force down through my hips into the ground, and tried to push the ground back up as a counter-strike.
The earth hesitated-his ring had told it to be lazy-but my Harmony convinced it that this was honest work.
Stone answered.
His boot skidded on the rising rock, just enough.
“Lucent Harmony,” he said, glancing at my feet.
“Cute.” “It’s not for you,” I replied.
We split for a breath, then closed again.
He threw a wide net of Requiem threads, a web designed not to catch me, but to ruin my follow-through.
It was a little story he was telling the world: everything inside this net is incomplete.
He meant to starve my carry-through law, to make every cut of mine chatter and die.
I didn’t argue with the net.
I walked smaller truths inside it.
My law of first bite became first touch, then shrank again to first grain.
The blade bit anyway, because I was only telling it to do one tiny thing, not three loud ones.
The net hissed as if it were disappointed.
Jack smiled faintly, then flared the Ember at my elbow.
He didn’t stop my swing.
He stopped my decision to angle it at his shoulder.
My cut slid harmlessly across his mantle.
The Ember wrote: no angle.
I swore once, under my breath, and shaped the next cut so the angle happened last.
He let me have the point, a small nod of acknowledgement.
“Learning.” He deepened the circle, and the edits thickened.
The air took on a soft pressure, as if the world were holding its breath.
A small tumble of pebbles started down a shelf of rock, then changed its mind and lay still.
My own breath tried to settle into an easy rhythm I hadn’t chosen.
Don’t let him set your ending, Valeria warned.
“I won’t,” I said, and meant it.
I slid to my right, weight low, and wrote my laws smaller still.
First touch.
Shortest line.
One breath.
I let my body choose a new target mid-step.
Our blades met with a single, clear sound.
I felt his Ember tug at the idea of my exit, wanting me to hang in the exchange for a fraction too long.
I cut my exit into a different place entirely.
Not back.
Not through.
Down.
The basalt took the line and accepted it.
The shard of rock I raised with the cut popped up into my off-hand like a flipped coin.
He reached out with his power to rewrite it into dust.
I fed the shard a drop of Harmony-the simple promise that you are what you are until the work is done.
The shard stayed a shard.
I threw it at his knee, not to hurt him, but to make his next perfect ending trip over something small and rude.
He laughed once, a short, sad, bitter sound.
“You would have loved her,” he said, and the words hit harder than any fist.
“I did,” I answered, and met his next charge.