Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 374: Transcendents Clash (III)

Finn had effectively removed the Space Transcendent from the board without even touching him. All Madoc and Osmund had to do was shadow his movements, placing themselves directly in his path every single time he tried to strike, jump, or intervene against the Error Bearer.

If he pushed through them, the feedback would impact his own soul too. Worse still, now that Casmir knew these hidden clauses could trigger without any prior warning, he had no idea what other latent moves might activate an even more debilitating condition, worsening his tactical situation completely.

A grim, suffocating sensation settled over Casmir. He cast his eyes across the wider battlefield. Himothy was somehow still entirely occupied, throwing furious blind strikes against the microscopic cloud of the Collective that refused to leave him alone.

Lyris and the other primary Transcendents, including the enigmatic Soul Transcendent, were still tied up with Ryuga’s massive form far in the distance.

Right now, there was absolutely no one on the ground capable of holding Finn down. There was no one powerful enough to match his pace. Nocturne and Storm had just deployed to stall his bloody charge along the grand wall, but whether they could actually accomplish anything significant against the Heretic was highly debatable. They were a shell of their former glory, after all.

The vessels they currently inhabited, while miraculous feats of resurrection, were still artificial bodies that lacked the capacity of their original divine forms. The same could be said for their fractured souls. They were ancient beings used to manipulating the raw energy of faith, they were once objects of worship, not modern Transcendents bound to the system of fragments.

Whatever forbidden methodology the Soul Transcendent and Sage Limitless had used to stitch them into this era would never be as effective as their true divinity.

Finn was home free. Unless a drastic variable altered the balance of the battle immediately, the Error Bearer would continue to run amok through the ranks of the Sepulcher houses on the wall. At his current speed, he would dismantle one of the anchor points within a few dozen seconds.

Casmir’s eyes grew frantic. Behind him, he could feel Madoc and Osmund already reorienting themselves, floating down toward his position to maintain their suffocating proximity. The absolute inability to fight back against his own stolen power irked him to the point of madness.

He executed a series of small, spatial space jumps, shifting his coordinates short distances away just to stay ahead of the two Anaelle, keeping his eyes glued to the grand wall below in the desperate hope that something would break the current balance.

Then suddenly, as if the universe itself had heard his silent plea, a cataclysmic shift rocked the entire battlefield.

From the far distance, a deep, resonant tremor began to vibrate through the crust of the earth. The localized earthquake originated directly beneath the zone where Ryuga and the Transcendents were locked in combat.

The shockwave from the tremor was violent enough to cause the fifty-story grand wall of ice to shake and groan dangerously for several seconds, forcibly dragging the attention of every single combatant toward the source of the noise.

Deep beneath the frosted plains, something massive clawed its way out of the ground. The ice crust ruptured with a deafening noise, sending massive chunks of ice and earth into the sky. Cracks formed across the ground, racing all the way to the foundation of the grand wall itself.

Dozens of Caretaker Ossuarists and Master-ranked Arcanists who were locked in infantry skirmishes below lost their footing, screaming as they tumbled down into the dark, bottomless chasms opening up beneath their boots.

Through the cloud of pulverized ice and rising dust and snow, the entity that had dug itself out of the underworld finally came into full view.

It was a dragon of nightmarish, monumental proportions that was in no way lesser than Ryuga’s massive form. However, that was the only similarity between the nightmarish dragon and Ryuga. Compared to Ryuga’s purely serpentine, eastern dragon-looking form, this one was different.

It possessed massive, muscular legs and a set of colossal, tattered wings that blocked out the bleak light of the sky. It was a proper dragon in the traditional sense of the word, but its aesthetic was infinitely more terrifying than any natural beast.

Its entire hide was a sickly, deep purple color, with decaying green scales that made it look as though its flesh had undergone centuries of necrotic rot. Its eyes were two flat, featureless pools of solid white that held no pupils or life.

The undead abomination lunged directly for Ryuga, wrapping its massive, decaying claws around the black dragon’s midsection and pinning its coiled body in a vice grip in mid-air. Then, the rotten dragon split its jaws wide, and immediately, a stream of thick, black soul energy began to violently siphon out of Ryuga’s body, flowing directly into the gaping maw of the abomination.

A manic roar of pure excitement escaped Casmir’s lips as he hovered above the battlements, watching the scene. The Soul Transcendent had finally decided to stop playing the observer! He had gone all out!

Among all the modern fragment holders, he was the only entity Casmir knew who possessed a concept deep enough to compete with ancient legends like him, hold his ground, and even triumph over some.

But as Casmir watched the black energy rush out of Ryuga’s form into the soul-eating dragon, he couldn’t help the instinctive, freezing chill that went straight down his spine despite his excitement. He had recognized the nature of the spell the Soul Transcendent’s undead dragon was using:

It was the fabled, defining authority of the Soul Transcendent, an ultimate ability that many high-tier Transcendents had spent years theorizing about in whispers, though the man had never once displayed it in public until this very moment.

Now, completely unhidden before the eyes of the entire world, he was doing it. He was actively unraveling and extracting the soul essence from a living, breathing soul mass in real time.

Casmir snapped his gaze back toward the grand wall, looking directly at Finn. The Error Bearer’s blur of motion had visibly hitched. He was very clearly feeling the feedback already. There was no way he wouldn’t feel it. Ryuga was his personal soul mass, a direct extension of his own consciousness and soul.

Regardless of the physical distance between them on the field, it was Finn’s internal soul energy that was actively channeling and powering every single summon he had brought to this war. If the Soul Transcendent could maintain that necrotic siphon on the dragon, the connection would act like a bottomless drain, pulling continuously from Finn’s reserves as he continued to feed energy into Ryuga to keep the soul mass alive.

It was an impossible tactical dilemma. Finn either had to sever the connection and recall his soul mass, giving up his current battle dominance, or he had to allow his soul reserves to be systematically hollowed out by the Soul Transcendent, dramatically shortening the amount of time he could fight at full power.

A slow, mocking grin split across Casmir’s face where he hovered in the sky.

"What is your move now, Error Bearer?!"