Chapter 262: Force Of Heaven

The collision sent a shockwave through the street that shattered glass across three buildings simultaneously.

Windows blew outward in cascading bursts, and within seconds the street was filling up. Security personnel from the Eden estate poured out of the surrounding buildings, martial artists, all of them, moving fast with weapons ready. They took one look at what was happening in the middle of the road and stopped. There was nothing to do here except watch.

Adam was already handling it.

The angel absorbed the impact and flew back hard, skidding through the air before catching itself. Its hands dropped to its sides, and the next move came without delay. Light swords materialised above it by the dozen, then the dozens became scores, filling the sky in neat, deadly rows, each one angled downward and ready to drop.

Abigail and Dickson both took an involuntary step back.

The swords fell like a curtain of concentrated beams, fast and blanket-wide, designed to cover every angle of escape at once. Adam's supreme spirit answered before the first one hit. The giant skeleton manifested behind him and exhaled a cyclone that tore across the entire formation, wind and death affinity shredding through the light swords in one sweeping motion and disintegrating them before they reached the ground.

Adam was already gone by the time the last one dissolved.

Lightning wrapped his body and collapsed the distance in a fraction of a second. He came in from behind the angel, Judgement swinging in a clean arc, and split the creature straight down the middle. The two halves separated completely.

Then they dissolved into light.

The motes scattered upward and reformed, not once, not twice, but multiplied. Copies of the angel blinked into existence across the sky, surrounding Adam from above in a wide, enclosing ring. Each one identical. Each one radiating the same pressure as the original.

Adam clicked his tongue.

This is exactly why I hate holy light affinity.

Adam knew exactly what he was dealing with.

Holy light was a primary affinity, light, misdirection, and a thread of divinity woven through everything it touched. He knew the affinity well. It was Remedy's, and he carried access to it himself through Chaos. But using it here was off the table entirely. The angel held a fragment of the key tied to the holy light affinity. The moment Adam reached for it, control wouldn't stay with him, it would simply transfer. He wasn't making that mistake.

He went with what was his instead.

"Asura's Domain."

The technique spread outward in a wide pulse, pushing through a large portion of Tristan in every direction. The copies hanging in the sky above him came apart instantly, erased before they could react, the light they were made of disintegrating under the weight of the domain's absolute death.

But the original held.

A divine halo blazed to life around the angel's body, and the domain's influence stopped dead at its edge. The angel had erected its own domain the moment it felt the pressure coming, a counter-field that matched Adam's reach and refused it entry. Adam narrowed his eyes.

It had a domain of its own. That complicated things.

Across the street, the Mission Hall Manager of Tristan arrived with his acolytes in tow, moving fast, clearly responding to the pillar of light that had been visible from anywhere in the sector. He pulled up short the moment he saw what was floating in the sky, the angel, enormous and menacing, halo burning white against the dark, wings spread wide.

He stared at it for a long moment.

"It hasn't even been a full week."

The Dead Man's Valley incident had barely closed. Multiple martial artists had died during that operation. The sector had been in recovery mode since, and now something at this threat level had materialised directly inside his city limits. He looked from the angel to the figure standing in the street below it and made a quiet decision to hope very hard that Adam could handle this one too.

Adam studied the halo as Remedy stepped up beside him. "Do you need help?"

He shook his head.

He had one more option. He hadn't used it yet in a real fight. But the angel's domain was blocking Asura's reach, and brute force through Judgement had already proven temporary. He needed something that worked differently. Something that didn't hit the way the angel expected.

He exhaled once and activated the second bloodline.

Famine.

Brown markings crawled across Adam's skin, layering over the black lines of the War Bloodline in overlapping patterns that covered his arms and chest. The moment Famine activated, sand began pulling itself together around him from nothing, slow at first, then fast, drawn in from every direction like it had been waiting.

Two bloodlines at once was Adam's current limit. He knew that going in.

The bloodlines themselves caused him no harm, they never turned on their host because of [Equip] filtering such effects. But the surrounding environment was a different problem entirely. Bloodlines beyond standard grading were difficult to contain at this level of output, and with both running simultaneously, the control margin was narrow. What leaked out around the edges wasn't small.

Remedy read it immediately.

She moved without being asked, pulling the team back, sweeping Abigail and Dickson and the security personnel with her, creating distance between them and what was about to happen to the street.

Adam let go completely.

The sand exploded outward. Buildings along the street began dissolving at their foundations, their mass breaking down and feeding into the growing formation around Adam. The material gathered and rose, shaping itself into enormous tentacles that climbed into the sky, visible across all of Tristan, dwarfing the pillar of light that had drawn the crowds out minutes earlier. People who had come outside to watch one impossible thing were now watching something that made the first look minor.

Above it all, lightning clouds churned into existence, crackling and spreading across the sky as the War Bloodline pushed its output upward. The street below had stopped looking like a street. It looked like the edge of a desert that was still actively expanding.

The angel turned slowly, taking in the transformed landscape surrounding it.

He is displaying more power than the key he possesses should allow.

The thought registered as fact, not alarm. It raised its hand toward the sky anyway, and a concentrated beam of holy light punched upward through the lightning clouds, tearing a clean hole through the formation and scattering the charge across the remaining sky. The clouds broke apart around the gap. The desert below stayed exactly as it was.

Adam's eyes had gone pitch black and the sand tentacles launched.

The angel didn't try to fight the tentacles head-on.

The moment they launched, it pulled back instantly, putting air between itself and the constructs while the light beam tracked beside it like a lance. The tentacles gave chase, each one as wide as a building, moving with a speed that didn't match their size, closing the gap every time the angel tried to create distance.

It zigzagged. Sharp cuts left and right, letting the tentacles overshoot, threading through the gaps between them with precise, calculated movement. Then it made a sudden reversal, a tight turn that let all of them blow past at once and drove upward hard, punching through the cloud layer and climbing fast.

The tentacles followed it into the sky.

Higher and higher, breaking through cloud after cloud, the chase continuing above the city where the whole sector could see it if they looked up. The angel kept ascending until it hit the altitude it was looking for. Then it stopped.

The pillar of light surrounding it responded immediately. It collapsed inward, flowing from every direction into the angel's raised fist, compressing and compressing until the output was almost blinding. The angel turned. Faced downward. And dove.

Palm first. Straight down.

The descending strike formed a shape visible from every corner of Tristan a massive golden palm, wide enough to cover an entire district, tearing through the atmosphere on the way down with a sound like the sky being split. Everyone in the sector saw it. Nobody moved.

It hit the sand constructs first.

The tentacles disintegrated on contact, the Famine bloodline's mass dissolving under the weight of concentrated holy light like sand hitting water. The palm kept going. Nothing left to slow it down, it drove the remaining distance to the ground and connected with Adam directly, full force, with everything the angel had compressed into a single strike behind it.

The impact carved a crater into the entire sector.

When the dust cleared, Adam was flat in the centre of it, pressed into a perfect palm-shaped imprint in the ruined ground, the War and Famine markings flickering across his skin. The angel descended slowly, landing at the edge of the crater, and looked down at the broken figure below it. Holy light affinity bled from the impact point in slow pulses, burning at the edges of every wound, actively working against any healing response that tried to take hold.

It stepped forward and bent down toward Adam's chest, reaching for the Angel of Death.

Adam's body scattered into dust the next moment.

The particles moved fast and with purpose, shooting upward and driving directly into the angel's nose before it could process what had happened. The angel's eyes went wide behind the feathers covering them. Its hands snapped to its head.

The next moment, it clutched its skull and screamed.