He pushed his stride to the limit, his boots clattering against the stone steps, sending out rapid and faint echoes that bounced between the walls of the spiral staircase.
The moment Arthur's boots hit the last dozen steps leading to the top floor, the collision erupted in the darkness above.
The Guardian didn't negotiate, and he certainly didn't hold back.
He wanted to see exactly how much power this so-called forbidden existence had left.
The old man's face collapsed inward in that instant, his flesh twisting and spiraling beneath the skin until a massive, crimson-black eye of flesh tore its way out. The giant eye occupied the space where his features had been, and within its pale and cloudy pupil, countless tiny black pupils swarmed like insects, writhing as they stared forward.
Boom!
Black energy surged outward.
In that single heartbeat, every inscription within a hundred meters of the Polymath Tower was ignited by the gaze of that giant eye. The intense light caused the rune grooves on the stone walls to emit a piercing, mournful cry.
The giant eye focused its gaze on the grey-white skull at the center of the array.
With a single blink...
The silver-grey phantom that had condensed above the skull was instantly shredded into a cloud of scattered mist by that frantic gaze.
The skull across from him was thoroughly enraged by this strike.
A sinister luster suddenly flickered across the bone, which had previously looked like dead wood. Wherever this light passed, the pupils projected toward it shattered one after another.
But the Guardian felt no fear. Or rather, the Guardian reacted by increasing his power output.
The collapsing compound eyes suddenly froze. Then, a pair of those eyes appeared on the pale bone surface of The Man on the Wall at some unknown moment. In the next instant, hundreds of fleshy bulges erupted from the bone's surface, each one splitting open at the top to reveal writhing, pitch-black eyeballs.
The two forces slammed into each other within the cramped space at the top of the tower.
An invisible force field suddenly exploded.
It was a wave of tangible, crushing pressure that expanded outward in a ring from the center of the skull.
Crack!
The stained glass surrounding the tower top, intended for both reinforcement and decoration, shattered simultaneously in that instant, turning into countless colorful fragments that were swept into the air by the hurricane-force winds.
The heavy stone railings were also uprooted by the tearing air currents, swept away amidst the debris.
The wind howled in his ears, yet the Guardian stood in the eye of the storm as if cast from bronze.
His robes flapped violently, and the dark tissue clinging to the floor gripped the gaps between every floor tile like tempered steel.
In the next moment, the white-haired figure in the eye of the storm vanished abruptly.
When he reappeared, he had already stepped into the inner circle of the array, standing straight and tall directly in front of the skull.
Two cracks split open on either side of the eerie giant eye on his face, and two withered arms reached out.
The arms were shrouded in dark tissue, their palms and backs covered in dense, pitch-black eyeballs. His fingers, like steel claws, tore through the viscous black air currents around him and lunged fiercely for the skull's cheekbones.
Bang!
Accompanied by a dull, ear-splitting thud, the entire hundred-meter-tall main tower shook violently, sending dust cascading from the cracks in the stone.
On the spiral staircase, the two people desperately climbing upward felt the ground drop out from beneath them.
The violent ripples of power vented down through the passage. Without a moment's pause, they ground the protective barriers around them into dust.
The force was too heavy to withstand, tossing them both into the air and slamming them hard against the solid stone walls before they tumbled several steps down in a pathetic heap.
Arthur barely managed to steady himself on the stone steps, his face deathly pale.
The full strike of a fifth-rank, even just the stray aftershocks, was not something he, an injured transcendent, could easily endure—let alone Hilde, whose rank was lower than his.
He turned to look. Hilde had been thrown even further, hitting the corner below. She was clutching her chest as she struggled to stand, a thin line of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.
Before he could even catch his breath, a sound of dry, agonizing friction echoed from the top of the tower.
It was the sound of bone being torn apart by immense force.
The sound reverberated through the long passage, muffled and grating, carrying a strange vibrato.
Before the dry echoes could fade, a strange, light-grey mist suddenly billowed from the cracks in the skull's surface.
The mist moved with incredible speed, turning into a thick tide in the blink of an eye, swallowing the Guardian as he stood within the inner circle of the array.
The scene shifted abruptly.
The rough stone floor, the shattered glass dust, and the shaking stone walls of the main tower all vanished in an instant.
The light before the Guardian dimmed, and the surroundings plunged into a dead silence.
The wind stopped, the Polymath Tower was gone, and even the surging, roaring transcendent power within his body was mostly suppressed by this domain. It could only churn deep within him, unable to be unleashed with its previous ferocity.
He was standing on a vast plain.
Beneath his feet was a massive canyon, looking like a gash hacked into the earth by a sharp blade, its depths invisible and stretching downward into pitch darkness.
On either side of the canyon were steep, cold stone walls. Not a single blade of grass grew on their edges; only endless light-grey mist swirled and rolled around him.
It was so silent that one could have heard a pin drop.
Any sound that went out would be silently swallowed by that thick mist.
The eerie giant eye on the Guardian's face slowly closed.
With his transcendent power mostly suppressed, the fleshy eyes that had densely bulged beneath his skin now shrank back one by one, hiding again under his withered skin. Yet, no panic showed on the old man's face, only his habitual coldness and vigilance.
He lowered his head and glanced toward the bottomless abyss of the canyon.
"So, this is a domain."
His voice was extremely low, sounding faint in this empty wilderness.
The Man on the Wall could not forcibly drag a fifth-rank expert.
However, that close-range strike and the claws directly gripping the skull's cheekbones had become the opening He needed to forcibly drag the battlefield back to His home ground.
In this narrow crevice opened by His will, even a fifth-rank transcendent would have much of their edge worn away by the rules of this place.
Yet, this domain was ultimately being held open by His shattered remains. It could bind the Guardian's hands and feet, but it could not crush a fifth-rank who was similarly bound to the tower.
Ultimately, it was two broken entities facing each other here; neither could truly defeat the other.
But this deathly silence also happened to drag that life-and-death struggle onto a different track.
This shift turned the battlefield into a negotiation table.
Arthur gritted his teeth and climbed up from the steps, brushing the debris off himself. A faint, sweet metallic taste rose in his throat.
He didn't have time to check his injuries. He gripped the handrail and sprinted toward the top of the tower while reaching into his coat to pull out a dark crystal the size of a fingernail.
It was a communication crystal used internally by the Nightwatchers.
A faint red light flickered at Arthur's fingertips as he tried to pour transcendent ripples into it to send a message to Kraus below.
But the crystal's surface remained dead and silent.
The transcendent thread inside that should have lit up was dark and lifeless. The ripples could not be sent out; they couldn't even bypass the range of the main tower.
Arthur's pace slowed by half a beat, his face so dark it looked like it could drip ink.
The Guardian had sealed the tower.
After that old fellow had bound himself to the Polymath Tower's inscriptions yesterday, the opening and closing of the entire main tower had effectively fallen into his hands.
He had no intention of letting anyone up the tower to interfere. He had specifically used this move to cut off Arthur's retreat and prevent him from seeking help from Kraus.
One-on-one. He intended to keep all irrelevant eyes out.
Arthur squeezed the useless crystal tightly in his fingertips, a profound sense of powerlessness rising in his heart.
Communication was cut, he couldn't win in a fight, and now even going to the top floor to persuade them to stop had become a fantasy.
He, the Inscriptionist Kraus had left in the tower to repair the locking runes, was now the only one in the tower who could still move—and the only one witnessing all of this.
He stuffed the discarded crystal back into his coat and, gripping the cold stone handrail, began to climb again, step by step.
The only thing he could do was reach the top, keep his eyes on this chaotic mess, and hope that it wouldn't slide toward that path of complete, irreversible self-destruction.
Within the domain, the grey mist rolled with increasing thickness, pressing in layer upon layer.
The white-haired old man standing at the edge of the canyon appeared even calmer than he had been at the top of the main tower.
His face, covered in liver spots, had smoothed out, returning to his withered, aged appearance. He allowed the cold wind to catch the wide hem of his robes.
With that single clash outside, he had already secretly measured the other's strength.
With his current broken shell of a body that had only half a life left, it was nearly impossible to completely wipe out the remains of a forbidden existence. Even if he sacrificed his life to self-destruct, the opponent would at most fall back into a deep sleep, while he himself would be reduced to ashes.
The reason he had attacked the moment they met wasn't that he was truly mad enough to seek mutual destruction.
He needed this high-and-mighty forbidden existence to understand that he had the power to hurt Him.
Only after the other party had seen blood would he be able to ensure that he wasn't led by the nose by an ancient existence who had lived for countless ages during the subsequent negotiations.
This was his true plan as the "Guardian" of the main tower.
Having lived in this sealed Bronze City for five or six hundred years, he had long since become a cunning old fox.
Since the greedy lot at the imperial center had decided to transport this head into Bronze City, it must have been a decision made after weighing the pros and cons and making the necessary trade-offs.
As a crippled old man locked into the Polymath Tower by inscriptions, he wasn't so naive as to try and flip the Empire's chessboard.
There wasn't much he could actually do.
It was nothing more than using the edge he had just shown to place a halter on the entity sleeping at the top of the tower.
At the very least, He would not be allowed to display His divine power as recklessly as before on this land of Bronze City.
Deep within the grey mist, The Man on the Wall fell into a long silence.
He coldly scrutinized the old Nightwatcher standing by the canyon, the dark hue in His eye sockets constantly churning and contracting.
At this point, He had no better options.
Though the Guardian's claw strike earlier hadn't shattered the skull, it had managed to carve a spiderweb of extremely fine cracks into the bone beneath the cheekbone.
That tiny crack was still emitting a faint, ghostly blue light.
This was the bargaining chip the old man had placed on the negotiation table.
He could ignore the Empire's harvesting and the prying eyes of other fourth-rank transcendents, but when His only remaining physical vessel was in danger of being damaged, He had to back down.
Rate on N.U.
