Chapter 397

The battle—

if it could even be called that—

lasted less than three seconds.

Ansu moved first.

Hundreds of quadrillions of exalted souls detonated simultaneously.

The shockwave alone should have been enough to level a mountain range.

Should have been.

Izparut raised his staff once.

A single rune unfolded.

And the explosion—

simply stopped.

Not deflected.

Not absorbed.

Stopped.

As though the concept of "explosion" had been quietly removed from the equation.

"...Kid."

Ansu's voice reached Rei through their soul-link.

Strained. Tight.

Like a man trying to sound calm while already understanding,

with perfect clarity,

that he was going to lose.

"Whatever you're planning—"

"Do it now."

Rei was already moving.

Not toward Iz.

Away.

Not running—

calculating.

His eyes swept the battlefield.

God-Tier · Lighthouse of All Laws fed him information in real time:

Iz's magic radiated outward in layers,

each layer a different school,

each school containing hundreds of sub-disciplines,

all of them active simultaneously,

all of them watching.

There was no blind spot.

No gap.

No angle of approach that wasn't already covered.

Is there truly no path?

Rei's mind worked at full acceleration.

Ascension Apex State continued stacking—

Layer after layer building silently,

irrelevant to the outcome but still accumulating,

because stopping meant giving up,

and Rei did not give up.

Behind him,

Ansu collided with Iz's outermost defensive layer.

The sound it made—

was not the sound of power meeting power.

It was the sound of something enormous

striking something immovable.

A deep, hollow reverberation

that shook the bones without moving the air.

"HAHH—"

Ansu roared.

Billions of death souls detonated against Iz's staff.

For one instant—

just one—

the infinite radiance around Iz wavered.

Rei saw it.

There.

Not a gap in his defense.

Not a weakness in his magic.

But a shift in his attention.

Even Iz—

even a Level 9 Mage—

had directed 0.003% of his focus toward Ansu's assault.

0.003%.

In any other context,

that number would be meaningless.

Against Iz,

it still meant almost nothing.

But Rei was not looking for victory.

He was looking for distance.

Wishes.

The word surfaced in his mind.

He had two unfulfilled.

One of them—

he had structured carefully,

deliberately,

as a safety net.

To survive an encounter that should have killed me.

He hadn't known when he would need it.

He hadn't known what form it would take.

But the wish existed.

And wishes, once made through the Lighthouse of All Laws—

had a way of bending reality toward their fulfillment.

Deep Earth.

Fantasy into reality.

Make it real.

Rei did not speak the wish aloud.

He did not need to.

It was already written into the structure of the world,

waiting for the moment it was needed most.

The moment arrived.

CRACK—

Space fractured.

Not violently—

not explosively—

but quietly,

the way ice splits under sustained pressure:

a thin, precise line appearing in the fabric of the air

directly in front of Rei.

He didn't hesitate.

He threw himself through it.

Behind him—

"ANSU!"

He roared the name as he crossed the threshold.

*"I'll drag you in—

grab on!"*

Ansu heard.

He was already in pieces.

Iz's counter had arrived the instant Rei moved—

not as punishment,

not as fury—

but with the calm, mechanical precision

of a man completing a necessary task.

The black staff swept once.

A single arc of ninth-tier force

passed through Ansu's spirit body

like a blade through smoke.

Hollow cavities opened across his form.

His soul-light guttered.

But his hand—

one withered, spectral hand—

caught the edge of the fracture

as it began to close.

Rei seized it.

He pulled.

And they fell—

through the crack,

through the between-space,

through somewhere that had no name and no light—

into silence.

Darkness.

Complete.

Absolute.

The fracture sealed behind them without a sound.

Rei lay still for a long moment,

staring upward into nothing.

His body reported damage in sequence:

three cracked ribs from spatial compression,

magic reserves at critical low,

soul essence nearly depleted,

Ascension Apex State—

still stacking.

He almost laughed.

Still stacking.

Even now.

He turned his head.

Ansu was beside him.

Or what remained of Ansu.

His spirit body had been torn through in a dozen places.

Light leaked from the gaps in slow, dying pulses.

He looked like a lantern someone had shot arrows through.

His single visible eye found Rei.

The look in it was—

complicated.

"...You owe me."

Rei said nothing for a moment.

Then:

"You're alive."

"Barely."

"That counts."

Ansu made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a curse.

His thoughts drifted into Rei's mind, fragmented:

...Never thought my first real battle in this era...

...would be against something like that.

...That wasn't a mage.

...That was a principle.

Rei closed his eyes.

He understood.

He had stared directly into Iz's magic through the Lighthouse of All Laws

and seen not technique,

not accumulated power,

but something closer to a natural law—

magic that did not feel like something Iz used

but something Iz was.

Level 9.

The boundary between mortal and something else entirely.

He said the contamination can't be saved.

He said I'm already destined to become what destroys the world.

He said—

Rei stopped the thoughts.

He pressed them flat and held them there.

Not now.

Not yet.

He needed to assess what remained.

He needed to check the Wishes.

And he needed—

he reached into the structure of his magic—

to understand what that fracture in space had given him

in exchange for tearing reality open.

Something had entered him through the crossing.

Something that hadn't been there before.

It was enormous.

Ancient.

And it tasted like the end of everything.

Rei opened his eyes.

He stared into the dark.

A Forbidden Magic.

He breathed once, slowly.

...Iz.

You came to kill me.

You said there was no way to save me.

But you used that spell—

Historical Extraction—

knowing I would survive.

Knowing what I would take from you in the crossing.

Why?

The darkness did not answer.

Ansu's presence flickered beside him, dim and wounded.

The two of them lay still in the silence between spaces.

And Rei—

for the first time in a very long time—

did not move immediately toward the next goal.

He simply existed.

Alive.

Impossibly, unreasonably alive.

And thought about what it meant

that his master had come to kill him—

and somehow, in doing so,

had given him exactly what he needed

to survive what came next.