The Extra is a Genius!?-Chapter 617: Noel vs Roberto [IV]

Roberto stayed silent, but the silence between them had changed shape. Heavier now, lodged between each clash of steel and each step over that white ground, as if Noel’s words had left a crack somewhere Roberto did not want touched.

Their blades met again at close range. Noel forced Revenant Fang down along Roberto’s guard, turned his wrist, and stepped in with his shoulder behind the motion to steal his balance. Roberto absorbed it cleanly and answered with a short strike toward Noel’s ribs, then another toward his throat. Noel slid away from the second and, for the first time since arriving in that dimension, chose to create real distance instead of filling it.

Roberto noticed immediately. "What are you doing?"

Noel did not answer. He raised his free hand toward the white sky above them, and mana gathered there at once. At first it looked like a dark point suspended high overhead, small enough to miss if one blinked. Then it began to grow. Slowly. Relentlessly. Black fire folded inward around a single core until the thing above them stopped looking like a spell and started looking like a sun being born in the wrong world.

That was when the dimension changed.

The endless white overhead dimmed by degrees. The horizon lost some of its sterile certainty. Light no longer ruled that place alone. Something else had entered it, forcing its presence upward, claiming a place in the sky where no darkness should have existed.

Roberto looked up fully then, and for the first time since dragging Noel there, uncertainty reached his face without disguise. The dark mass kept rising, larger now, heavier, its surface rippling with compressed black fire until the white sky seemed caught beneath an impossible eclipse.

"That shouldn’t be possible."

Noel finally looked at him. "Eclipse Sun." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The words left him quietly, but the black star above kept climbing, and with every second it became harder for Roberto’s world to pretend it had room for only one law.

Roberto did stop this time. Not completely. His sword remained raised, his body still ready, but his attention had shifted upward in a way Noel had not seen before. The black sun continued to rise through that white dimension, dark fire folding inward around itself while the false sky lost more of its authority with every passing second.

"How?" Roberto asked. The word came out low, almost unwilling. His eyes returned to Noel. "How did you bring real darkness into this place?"

Noel kept "Eclipse Sun" above them and moved at the same time, stepping in with Revenant Fang before Roberto could fully settle. Their blades met again, sharp and close, Roberto answering on instinct even while his mind was elsewhere. Noel slid along the guard, cut low, then broke away before the counter could close cleanly.

"I met Noctis," Noel said.

That made Roberto pause for real. Only for a heartbeat, but it was there.

"When I reached Manacode, I entered that place for the first time. I saw him there." Another exchange followed, Roberto parrying late enough that steel rang harder than before. "I saw Elarin too."

Roberto’s expression tightened. "What?"

Noel pressed again, forcing him to keep talking through movement. "He looked helpless in that prison Noctis made for him. Quiet. Trapped. Like he couldn’t do anything from there." He turned his wrist, broke the angle of Roberto’s blade, and forced him back a step. "That was the first time I started understanding how those kinds of spaces actually work."

Roberto did not answer immediately. His sword moved, his body moved, but the silence in him had changed again.

"So from that point on," Noel said, "I kept experimenting. Tried. Failed. Thought about it again. Tried another way. Connected what I saw there to what I already understood here." His gaze stayed fixed on Roberto’s. "It took me months."

Roberto’s jaw tightened.

"I didn’t do this by luck." Their blades collided once more, and this time Noel drove forward enough to force Roberto into retreat instead of balance. "There are no absolute limits, Roberto."

Roberto’s expression hardened. "That shouldn’t be possible."

The words came out lower than before, stripped of that usual calm he wore like armor. His eyes lifted toward the false sky of his own dimension, and what he saw there no longer resembled the world he had built. The white had been swallowed almost completely now, not erased in a violent burst, but covered, overtaken, turned into something else by the slow rise of that black sun. Darkness had spread through the expanse until the horizon itself lost shape, and the place that had once looked made of pure light now felt like a dead world waiting beneath an eclipse.

Noel kept his eyes on him. "Why not?"

Roberto said nothing.

Noel took one step forward, Revenant Fang still in hand, his voice steady in a way that made the answer land harder. "I think every person sets their own limits. In the same way you created this dimension, I found a way to force my own law into it."

That silence returned again, but now it belonged to Roberto more than to the space between them. The white floor beneath their feet was still there, but dim now, stripped of its certainty. That suffocating brightness that had denied Noel every path of shadow was gone, and what replaced it was something far closer to his own side of the world.

Roberto lifted one hand, and a small point of light bloomed over his fingertip. Not an attack. Only a pale glow, enough to push back the dark around his hand and part of his arm. He turned slightly, trying to catch Noel in that weak circle of light.

He couldn’t. Noel was no longer where he had been.

For the first time since bringing him there, Roberto’s dimension had become a place where sight itself could not be trusted. The darkness did not merely cover the space. It favored Noel inside it.

Roberto’s light moved once, then again, searching. Nothing.

Then Noel’s voice came from somewhere ahead, close enough to feel wrong and far enough to make the distance uncertain.

"Now it seems I’m fine again."

A beat of silence followed.

"I think it’s time to end this, Roberto."

The small light over Roberto’s finger trembled almost invisibly as the darkness around him remained whole, and somewhere inside that blackened version of his own dimension, Noel had already begun moving again.