Primordial Heir: Nine Stars

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.

The temperature around him didn’t just rise; it skyrocketed. The very air caught fire. The rocky ground at his feet didn’t char—it began to melt, bubbling into pools of sluggish lava. He was no longer a man wielding fire. He was the heart of a volcano given form, he had become the embodiment of the very law he wield.

Across the battlefield, Subject #009’s golden eyes, for the first time, showed pure, unadulterated shock. The data was gone. This was off every scale. The pressure from him now wasn’t just power; it was annihilation, a state only she heard off, a state only zodiac could manifest but even that, you must be really powerful and understood your law, accept it and it must accept you in return if not it wouldn’t work, you must be in a perfect synchro with it, something a young man was achievement at the Red Knight level, completely unheard of, this boy seems to have been created to shatter every expectations, they must have him at all costs.

In the meantime, Nero knew he couldn’t hold his current state for too long. He was burning himself from the inside out. He had seconds.

He moved. He didn’t run. He erupted. A geyser of living flame shot across the space between them, so fast it looked like a beam of solid crimson light. He was aiming to punch straight through her wind domain with pure, overwhelming thermal energy.

She reacted instantly, her analytical mind snapping back into focus despite the shock. She couldn’t afford to be overwhelmed. She poured her prana into her domain, not to maintain it, but to intensify it. The calm, controlled sphere of wind around her became a visible, roaring maelstrom of silver and gold. The wind compressed, layered, spun at speeds that could grind diamonds to dust. It wasn’t just a shield now; it was a blender of atmospheric force.

He hit it.

KABOOOOOOOM-FFFFFFFFSSSSSHHHHHH!!!

The sound was an apocalyptic mix of a bomb blast and a world-ending hurricane. The molten ground for a hundred yards in every direction was instantly blown away, vaporized. The conflicting energies—his all-consuming fire and her hyper-compressed, cyclonic wind—created a temporary deadlock of terrifying power.

For a moment, it held. Then, with a sound of tearing reality, Nero’s fiery form pierced through. He didn’t break her domain; he burned a tunnel straight through it. He appeared inside her protective sphere, his flame-wreathed fist aimed at her heart.

She was ready. She couldn’t stop the fist, but she twisted at the last possible microsecond. His blazing knuckles, which would have vaporized her, instead grazed her side.

The effect was still catastrophic. A chunk of her golden wing and a portion of her torso simply vanished, turned to superheated ash. She let out a choked gasp of pain, the first sound of true injury she’d made.

But she was still in control. And his unstoppable charge had spent itself. The tunnel through her domain closed behind him, trapping him inside the heart of her deadly windstorm.

He was inside her kill zone. And his embodied fire state was flickering, the crimson in his hair fading back to blue at the roots, the new flame tattoos dimming. He had wounded her, gravely, but he hadn’t finished it.

Her golden eyes, filled with pain and cold fury, met his. With a final, immense effort of will, she compressed her entire domain inward, onto him alone. All that swirling, cutting, crushing wind focused into a single, point-blank implosion around Nero’s fading fiery form.

There was no grand explosion. Just a terrible, final WHUMP of collapsing pressure.

The fire around Nero snuffed out instantly. His draconic features receded. He was just a badly wounded young man again, his clothes in tatters, his body covered in burns and deep lacerations from the wind blades. The force of the implosion picked him up and hurled him through the air like a ragdoll.

He crashed into the base of the melted cliffside, the impact driving the air from his lungs. He crumpled to the steaming ground, his body wracked with convulsions as he vomited, a mix of blood and soot. He couldn’t move. He could barely see. The world was a blur of pain and ringing silence.

He had thrown everything he had, even transforming into the essence of his law. He had wounded the powerful enemy. But in the end, the gap in their realms, the sheer control of her Purple Knight domain, had been too much.

He lay broken in the wreckage, utterly spent, the fight beaten out of him. The golden-winged woman, clutching her seared side, stood amidst the dying winds of her domain, her victory hard-won and far more costly than she ever anticipated.

’This boy is dangerous.’ she concluded, her golden eyes narrowed down into slits, murderous aura burst out from her, for a moment she considered outright eliminating this young man but the organization’s orders were absolute.

Puk!

She vomited a mouthful of scorching blood, staggering on her feet. Time to bring the curtain down.