Primordial Heir: Nine Stars-Chapter 348: Final

Nero lay on the steaming rock, like a broken puppet. Every breath was a knife in his ribs. Blood filled his mouth, metallic and warm. He coughed, spraying red across the ground.

Across the shattered battlefield, Subject #009 moved. She was hurt too. A part of her side and wing was just... gone, burned away. Golden fluid, not blood, seeped from the wound. But she was standing. She was still in control.

She walked toward him, slow and careful. She didn’t trust him. Not even now. Her golden eyes were locked on his limp form.

As she walked, the air around her began to move, not in big gusts, but in tiny, terrible ways. She was weaving the wind itself into hundreds—no, thousands—of invisible threads. Each one was thinner than a hair and sharper than a razor. She was creating a net of silent death around herself, and she was bringing it with her toward Nero. She would cut him apart from a distance. She would not get close.

Five meters away, she stopped. The net of wind threads floated around her, ready to slice forward.

Nero didn’t move. His eyes were half-closed. He looked finished.

Then, from his broken body, a dark blue fire erupted.

It wasn’t a big explosion of flame. It was a sudden, hungry wave of deep, midnight-blue fire that shot out from him in all directions, moving faster than thought. It didn’t roar; it hissed with a cold, terrifying heat, trying to swallow everything, including her.

She was ready. She had been waiting for a trick.

The moment the blue fire surged, her fingers twitched. The thousands of invisible wind threads she had woven didn’t shoot forward. They snapped inward, wrapping around her own body in a blindingly fast, protective cocoon.

The dark blue fire hit the cocoon of wind threads.

For a second, there was a terrible, grinding sound as the hungry fire tried to burn through the spinning, cutting wind. The wind tried to shred the fire.

Then it all exploded.

WHUMP-BOOM!

The force was immense. The cocoon of wind threads shattered, scattering the blue fire into a million dying embers. But the explosion blew Subject #009 off her feet. She was hurled backward through the air, tumoring end over end, before crashing into a pile of broken, melted stone fifty feet away.

Silence fell again, thicker than before.

Smoke and the smell of ozone filled the air. Nero lay where he was, the strange blue fire gone, completely still now, no tricks left. A small, final plume of dark smoke curled from his chest.

From the rubble, a single, golden wing twitched. She was down, but not out. The last desperate attack had bought a moment, but the fight—what was left of it—was still not over.

Pain was like a universe. It was the cracked stone beneath him, the ragged gasp of air in his lungs, the wet, hot feeling of blood soaking what was left of his clothes. Nero’s draconic transformation was gone, leaving only broken skin, shattered scales that felt like loose gravel under his flesh, and bones that screamed with every tiny movement. He was a ruin.

But his eyes... his eyes were clear. A stormy, furious apocalyptic red, locked on the pile of rubble across the way.

With a groan that tore from the deepest part of his chest, he forced his body to move. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. Then his knees. Golden lightning, weak and sputtering, crackled around his limbs. It wasn’t an attack. It was a crude, painful stimulant, using the energy to force his torn muscles to contract, to lift him.

He stumbled to his feet, swaying. The world tilted. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the melted ground. His right hand, trembling, reached for the hilt of his sword, still lying nearby. His fingers, numb and cut, closed around it. He dragged the blade up, its tip scraping a shrieking line in the rock.

Across the battlefield, the rubble shifted. Subject #009 pushed herself up. Her regeneration was horrifying to watch. The seared, gaping wound on her side was knitting itself back together with sickening speed, new golden flesh and feather-stems weaving over the damage. Her broken wing straightened with a series of audible cracks. But her movements were jerky, animalistic. The cool calculation was gone, burned away by pain and his last surprise. What looked back at him now was a frenzied, wounded beast of wind and gold.

She saw him standing. A raw, soundless snarl twisted her features. She didn’t speak. She launched herself at him, a broken comet. Her good wing beat once, not for flight, but for a violent burst of speed. The other, still mending, hung limp.

And as she came, she unleashed everything she had left. Not a domain, not a careful spell. Pure, hateful chaos. The air between them rippled, not with one attack, but with a million. Invisible threads of hyper-compressed wind, each one a killing wire, shot toward him in a dense, horizontal cloud. It was a wall of silent, certain death.

Nero couldn’t dodge, not in this state. But he didn’t need to see them.

His eyes changed.

The Void Eyes (Temporary name) activated. And the world became different. He no longer saw a golden monster or a million invisible threads. He saw the intricate, glowing latticework of the Law of Wind that formed each thread. He saw the pulsing nodes of energy, the connections, the beautiful, lethal design of it all.

And he understood how to unmake it.

He didn’t have the strength to fight it. So he would erase it.

He focused his will through his red eyes, targeting not the threads themselves, but the fundamental command holding them together. The concept of "cut."

"Nullify."

A wave of invisible negation pulsed from him. It wasn’t an attack. It was a cancellation.

Where the pulse met the leading edge of the wind-thread cloud, the threads didn’t break. They... ceased to exist. The complex latticework of the law dissolved into harmless, dispersing energy. A five-foot-wide tunnel of safety was carved instantly through the wall of death.

But it wasn’t enough. The tunnel was narrow, and she was still coming, the rest of the threads on either side screaming in to fill the gap. He tried to move into the safe zone, but he was too slow, too broken.

Three threads on the left, unseen by normal sight, sliced into him. One cut deep into his thigh. Another carved a line across his ribs. The third, the most terrible, whipped across his right forearm—the arm holding his sword. It cut through muscle and tendon with surgical precision. He felt the connection to his hand go dead. His fingers spasmed. The sword, his lifeline, dropped from his numb grip, clattering to the ground.

She saw it. Through her frenzy, she saw his weapon fall. A flash of triumph, cold and final, lit her golden eyes. She was upon him, her good wing pulled back like a bladed scythe, aiming to take his head.

She thought she had won.

It was what he needed.

His right arm was useless. But his left was still his own.

As her wing-blade swept for his neck, he didn’t try to block with his dead arm. He dropped his whole body, falling forward into her arms. The killing wing passed over his head, close enough to shear off his hair.

He came up inside her guard, his face inches from hers. He saw the triumph in her eyes turn to sudden, stunned confusion.

His functional left hand shot up. He wasn’t holding a weapon. His hand was the weapon. He had gathered the last dregs of his Lightning and Fire, not around a sword, but around his own fingers. His hand became a shimmering, unstable claw of white-hot plasma and crackling gold.

With a final, explosive surge of will, he drove that clawed hand straight into her chest, through the newly-regenerated golden flesh, through bone, and closed it around the beating, magically-enhanced core of her heart.

At the exact same moment, with the last command from his brain to his ruined right side, he kicked out. His foot hooked the fallen sword from the ground, flipping it up. His left hand, buried in her chest, released her heart and snatched the spinning hilt out of the air.

In one continuous, brutal motion, he tore his hand from her chest and swept the sword in a horizontal arc.

Shhh-click.

The blade, fueled by the last sparks of his dual laws, passed through her neck without resistance.

Time seemed to freeze.