Primordial Heir: Nine Stars-Chapter 346: A Losing Fight
The probing rounds, the test ended. Nero felt it—the cold, calculating pressure from the golden-winged woman shifting. She was done analyzing. She was beginning to act.
He couldn’t afford to wait. He couldn’t match her in a drawn-out battle of pure law mastery, he understood this, it was now it dawned on him he had been slacking off, Nero shook his head to focus on the ongoing fight. He had to hit her with everything he had, right now, before she could fully unleash whatever a Purple Knight was truly capable of.
With a mental roar, he stopped holding back. He didn’t just use Lightning or Fire separately. He fused them. The golden electricity around his body turned a violent, unstable white, threaded with veins of deep crimson fire. The air around him warped and screamed, burning and crackling at the same time.
He moved. Not with speed, but with a form of violent teleportation. The fused energy around him compressed and then detonated, propelling him forward in a straight line that left a trench of molten, glassy rock in his wake. He appeared in front of her, his fist already mid-swing, a swirling vortex of white lightning and red fire aimed at her core.
For the first time, her golden eyes widened with something beyond calculation: genuine alarm. She reacted instantly, not with a block, but with a command. She didn’t move her wings or her hands. She simply willed the air.
The space directly in front of her didn’t just harden; it became hers. This was the power of a Purple Knight—Domain Manifestation. Not a vast, world-altering field, but a small, intensely personal zone of absolute control over her law. In her ten-foot sphere, the wind didn’t just blow; it obeyed.
His powerful fist hit the edge of her domain.
The effect was horrific. The fused energy of his punch met a wall of hyper-compressed, cyclonic wind moving in a thousand different directions at once, each strand sharp enough to cut steel. It wasn’t a block; it was a shredder.
SCREEEEEEEEE—CRUNCH-BOOM!
The sound was a metallic shriek followed by a muffled explosion. Nero’s attack was violently dismantled. The white lightning was scattered into harmless sparks. The crimson fire was torn apart and suffocated. The force of his own punch backlashed, and the wind blades sliced into his scaled fist, his arm, his chest. Deep, burning gouges opened up across his torso. Golden ichor—his powerful unknown bloodline —mixed with sparks and steam.
He was thrown back, crashing through a spire of rock, shattering it to dust.
Before he could even hit the ground, she was on him. In her domain, she didn’t need to fly. The wind carried her. She was a phantom of golden light and cutting air. She appeared above him as he fell, a single talon extended. With a slight gesture, she compressed the air around that talon into a needle-thin point of impossible density and drove it down like a lance.
Nero twisted in mid-air, bringing his tail around in a desperate whip-crack. The tail, sheathed in his fused energy, met her wind-lance.
CRACK-THOOOM!
The tail held, but the impact point exploded. Scales were ripped away. He used the momentum to spin away, landing in a crouch several hundred feet away, breathing hard, his body a mess of smoking wounds.
This was the difference. She wasn’t just stronger. She had authority over the battlefield. In her small domain, she was untouchable. He was fighting the environment itself.
She gave him no respite. From across the distance, she simply pointed at him. The air around him solidified, trying to crush him in an invisible vise. He roared, bursting it apart with a discharge of raw lightning and fire, but the effort cost him more prana, more strength.
She closed in again, a serene, deadly goddess in her bubble of absolute control. He met her with pure, furious instinct. They clashed in a series of brutal, one-sided exchanges.
He would lunge with a fire-and-lightning claw. The wind in her domain would deflect it, and her counter-strike—a casual backhand empowered by a hurricane-force gust—would send him skidding back, blood flying from new cuts.
He tried a wide-area blast of lightning to disrupt her domain. She parted the lightning around her like curtains, then sent the scattered energy back at him as a hundred concentrated wind-guided needles.
He was being dismantled. Piece by piece. His draconic resilience was the only thing keeping him standing. Every blow he landed felt like punching a mountain. Every blow he took carved away at his strength, his scales, his will. His crimson and gold form was now darkened with his own blood and soot.
He was losing. Badly. The Purple Knight’s domain was a wall he couldn’t breach with brute force. The injuries were piling up, sapping his speed, clouding his mind with pain. He was like a raging storm trapped in a bottle of her making, beating himself to death against the walls. He needed something more. Something to break her perfect control, if only for a second.
The pain, the crushing pressure of her wind domain, the feeling of his own power being shredded—it all reached a breaking point inside Nero. He couldn’t win like this. Brute force and combined laws weren’t enough against her absolute control.
In that desperate, bleeding moment, he stopped trying to use his laws. He let one of them consume him.
He abandoned Lightning entirely. He focused every shred of his being, every ounce of his will, on the Law of Fire. Not to wield it, but to become it.
A silent, internal scream.
His dark blue hair flashed crimson, as if dyed by an inner blaze. The mysterious blue tattoo on his back and neck glowed with a fierce, electric light, but strange, new, intricate tattoos of swirling flame patterns appeared on his arms and across his chest, burning themselves into his skin with a searing heat.
Something was being born from the deepest part of his soul, from his inner world.
