Chapter 516: When Abomination Meets Destruction (2)

The first tendril struck like a falling tower.

Xander moved a single step.

The ground beneath his feet shattered outward as the strike missed him by inches, the impact blasting a crater large enough to swallow a house. Several other tendrils followed instantly, ripping through the air like living harpoons, each one covered in blinking eyes that twisted toward him with hateful awareness.

He slipped between them. Every movement seemed already decided before the attack even finished forming.

One tendril lunged for his chest. Xander raised a single hand.

Purple-black energy erupted from his palm.

"Break."

The tendril disintegrated mid-strike. It didn’t burn or explode, it simply collapsed into drifting ash, as if the concept of its existence had been rejected.

The creature screamed. The sound scraped across the mind like rusted metal dragged across bone. Behind the barrier, the soldiers recoiled even though they could no longer feel its full presence.

The void beast surged forward.

More limbs unfolded from its body, dozens of them, stretching and multiplying like a living storm. The air darkened as the creature’s mass expanded, its writhing core splitting open to reveal more screaming mouths.

The battlefield twisted as gravity bent toward the monster. The ground lifted in jagged chunks and began orbiting its body like debris around a black star.

Xander’s pink eyes gleamed.

"Interesting."

One of the floating rocks shot toward him like a cannon shell. He didn’t dodge... he clenched his hand.

The rock imploded into dust. Another came, then ten, then hundreds.

Each projectile shattered against an invisible pressure surrounding him as destruction energy radiated quietly from his body. But the creature wasn’t finished. Its central sphere split open.

From inside it spilled a dark mist that carried whispers, thousands of voices murmuring promises, threats, temptations.

Desire. Fear. Hunger.

All the impulses that drove a mind toward madness.

The mist rushed toward Xander like a living tide. For a moment, the battlefield became silent again. Then Xander smiled faintly. The air around him shifted.

His Sin stirred.

Lust.

Most people misunderstood that word. They thought it meant indulgence. Weakness, something shameful. But Lust was not weakness.

It was want.

The primal force that pushed every creature to chase something.

Power, survival, dominance., and Love.

The void beast felt it instantly. Its many eyes widened, because suddenly its own instincts betrayed it.

Its tendrils hesitated.

Its body twisted... not from fear, but from desire.

A strange pull spread through its warped consciousness. Something inside the creature began reaching toward Xander without permission.

A craving.

A need.

The abomination didn’t understand it.

It only knew it wanted something standing in front of it.

Xander.

The moment its attention fractured, Xander moved.

He vanished through raw acceleration. The ground detonated where he had stood. In an instant he appeared beside one of the creature’s massive limbs and drove his palm into it.

Destruction erupted.

The limb collapsed into particles that dissolved into nothingness. The void beast shrieked and retaliated instantly, its remaining limbs converging from every direction like a cage of spears.

Xander stepped into the storm.

His hands moved like a conductor guiding invisible blades.

Every touch erased something.

A tendril.

A cluster of eyes.

A writhing mass of flesh.

Each time his fingers closed, another portion of the creature simply ceased to exist.

But the abomination adapted.

New flesh grew.

New limbs sprouted.

Reality warped harder around it as its core pulsed violently.

Suddenly the creature opened every mouth across its surface.

A beam of black distortion erupted from the central sphere.

It wasn’t light.

It was the absence of light, a tearing wave of void energy large enough to erase an entire city block.

The soldiers inside the barrier gasped.

"Prince—!"

The beam swallowed Xander completely. The ground behind him disintegrated into a canyon as the attack carved through kilometers of land.

The beam continued for several seconds. Then it stopped.

Silence followed.

Smoke and void mist drifted across the battlefield. The soldiers stared in horror.

For a moment they thought...

The mist parted.

Xander stepped forward completely unharmed.

His horns blazed brighter, arcs of demonic light crackling softly. The pink glow in his eyes had deepened into something almost luminous. A thin veil of destruction energy surrounded his body like a second skin.

He rolled his neck lazily.

"That was rude."

The void beast recoiled.

For the first time since it appeared, the creature hesitated.

Because the instinct inside it had finally understood something important.

The thing standing in front of it...

Was worse than it was. Xander lifted his hand again.

The air screamed as a sphere of condensed destruction formed in his palm, dense enough to bend the light around it.

But he didn’t throw it.

Instead, he stepped forward again.

Because the Sin of Lust wasn’t finished playing with his prey yet.

And somewhere deep inside the abomination’s broken mind, a terrible realization began to form.

It had come here to hunt.

But now... It was the one being consumed.

...

It had stepped into the territory of a predator.

The void beast shrieked again, but this time the sound carried something new... panic.

Its massive body convulsed as more limbs tore free from its surface. Tendrils split into dozens of smaller ones, each tipped with snapping maws or needle-like claws. Its swollen core pulsed violently, pumping out waves of black distortion that warped the ground and sky alike.

It was abandoning restraint.

The battlefield twisted as gravity fluctuated wildly. Chunks of earth lifted into the air, spinning violently before being flung like artillery toward Xander.

Hundreds of projectiles screamed toward him.

He walked forward.

The sphere of destruction hovering in his palm pulsed slowly like a miniature dying star. The first wave of debris struck the invisible pressure around him and disintegrated into powder.

The second wave shattered before even reaching him. The third simply stopped midair and collapsed into nothing.

Behind him, the ten soldiers stared in stunned silence inside the barrier.

Half of them were still kneeling, barely able to breathe after witnessing the creature.

But their eyes were locked on the prince.

Xander didn’t even look at them.

His focus remained on the monster.

"Let’s stop wasting time."

The void beast erupted forward.

Its entire mass lunged like a collapsing mountain, hundreds of limbs spearing toward him at once. The air tore apart under the force of its charge, sonic booms cracking through the ruined landscape.

Xander vanished.

The impact where he had stood blasted a crater thirty meters wide, but he had already reappeared above the creature’s core. The abomination reacted instantly. Its limbs twisted upward, forming a writhing shield of flesh and claws.

Too slow.

Xander extended his hand. The destruction sphere collapsed inward. Then detonated.

But the explosion wasn’t fire.... It was erasure.

A silent wave rippled outward, consuming everything it touched. Dozens of tendrils vanished instantly. Chunks of the creature’s body simply ceased to exist, leaving empty space where flesh had been a moment earlier. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The void beast screamed in agony. But it was far from finished.

The core pulsed violently, and new limbs erupted from the wounded areas like frantic regeneration.

Eyes blinked open across its body. Hundreds of them. All staring at Xander.

The air suddenly thickened.

The Sin stirred again.

The creature’s instincts fractured under the invisible pressure of Xander’s presence. Its countless eyes began twitching erratically, some of them turning away from the prince despite its own will.

The monster wanted to attack, but something inside it hesitated.

Something deeper.

Something primal.

The Sin of Lust didn’t simply tempt hearts.

It rewrote impulse.

The abomination’s attention splintered under the force of desire it could not comprehend.

That single moment of hesitation was enough.

Xander dropped.

His body cut through the air like a falling blade.

The void beast reacted too late.

A massive claw swung toward him, capable of flattening buildings.

He caught it.

The ground beneath them shattered from the force of the collision. The creature pushed harder, but Xander didn’t move.

His pink eyes burned brighter.

"Break."

Destruction surged through his arm.

The void beast howled and lashed out with every remaining limb, the battlefield erupting into chaos as tendrils struck from every direction.

Xander stepped into the storm.

His hands moved like blades.

Every strike carried destruction.

A touch to a tendril—gone.

A swipe through a mass of eyes—gone.

A step through a writhing limb—gone.

He moved faster and faster, his form blurring across the battlefield as pieces of the monster disappeared with every motion.

Within seconds, nearly half the creature’s massive body had been erased.

The void beast panicked.

Its core began glowing violently as it prepared one final desperate attack.

The entire mass of the creature compressed inward.

Energy gathered.

The soldiers behind the barrier gasped.

That amount of power—

It was going to detonate.

Xander stopped moving.

He looked directly at the pulsing core.

Then he sighed softly.

"Alright."

His horns flared with brilliant purple light.

The glow in his eyes sharpened.

Destruction energy surged around his body like a rising tide.

The ground beneath his feet cracked as he stepped forward.

Once.

Twice.

Then he vanished.

He reappeared directly in front of the creature’s core.

The void beast reacted instantly, its remaining limbs snapping toward him in a final desperate strike.

Xander ignored them.

He simply raised his hand.

The world seemed to pause.

Then he drove his palm straight into the glowing core.

"Destruction."

Silence fell.

For one heartbeat.

Then the void beast collapsed.

Not exploded.

Collapsed.

Its entire body imploded inward as destruction devoured its existence from the inside out. Limbs folded into dust, eyes blinked out of reality, and the massive abomination shrank rapidly as its structure disintegrated.

Within seconds, it was gone. Only drifting black particles remained, dissolving into the wind.

The battlefield became quiet again. Xander slowly withdrew his hand from the empty space where the core had been. Behind him, the soldiers stared in stunned disbelief.

The monstrous horror that had nearly broken their minds...

Had been erased in minutes.

Xander turned slightly, his glowing eyes softening as he looked toward the barrier protecting them.

The destruction energy around him faded slowly. His horns dimmed back to their normal form.

"Everyone alive?"

For several seconds, no one answered.

Then one of the soldiers finally swallowed hard and nodded.

"Yes... Prince."

Xander stretched his arms lazily and glanced across the ruined battlefield.

"Good."

He began walking away as if nothing unusual had happened.

"Let’s keep moving."

Behind him, the soldiers looked at the empty battlefield again.

And a single thought spread silently through all of them.

If this was the power of the Sin of Lust...

Then the enemies of Anbord had truly picked a war with monsters.