Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

On the other side, Ethan had already stopped wasting attention on the fine details of their clash.

He only glanced toward where Valtheron and Zyraeth were facing off. Once he confirmed he wouldn’t need to step in for the moment, he plunged straight into the deeper end of the battlefield.

The situation was completely different now.

With a top-tier force like Valtheron on their side, they no longer had to worry about getting suddenly flattened by the enemy’s highest-level power.

So Ethan did what he was best at.

He shoved all their strength forward and turned it into wide-area slaughter—locking in their advantage as fast as possible.

The next instant, his power exploded outward.

White lightning crawled over his body and along the surface of his Powered Combat Armor, snapping back and forth before surging outward in every direction.

Energy Discs, compressed energy spheres, thunderstorm-like carpet bombardment—he dumped it all into the densest parts of the enemy formation.

Every impact sent bodies flying.

Sky and ground shook together, and explosions chained across the distance in overlapping waves.

At the same time, the Fairy and the native troops fully pressed in. Ravenkin dove from above. Stone Golems ripped open the enemy lines head-on with brutal, bulldozing force.

The entire plain had become a meat grinder.

Time stretched thin in killing like this.

Ethan couldn’t have said how long it had been when a strange ripple suddenly rolled across the world.

It didn’t belong to Ethan.

It didn’t belong to either army.

Anyone with even halfway decent instincts lifted their head at the same moment.

In Valtheron’s hands, a greatsword had appeared—no one even knew when.

The blade was absurdly long, so heavy it looked like it outweighed his whole body.

Most shocking of all were the dense golden runes carved across it. Every single rune was lit. Every single rune flickered with a violent energy that made the scalp go cold.

Even the faintest leakage from the sword’s surface was enough to tear open a thin, razor-dangerous dimensional rift in midair.

Boom!

A rolling thunderclap detonated higher up, as if the sky itself had been struck.

The moment Zyraeth truly recognized the sword, he went rigid.

"Impossible..."

For the first time, his voice shook in a way he couldn’t hide.

"That sword... it was shattered long ago. Where did you find it? How did you bring it back?"

Valtheron didn’t answer.

He simply wrapped both hands around the hilt.

In the next instant, the power inside him erupted, pouring down his arms and flooding into the sword.

The entire blade flared. The golden runes ignited in layers, one after another, and a savage force swept across heaven and earth.

And the moment that power truly unfurled, Zyraeth’s body started trembling uncontrollably.

Not nerves.

Something older. Deeper.

Instinctive fear, carved in over countless defeats.

He began backing away without even meaning to.

One step.

Two.

Three.

Even the energy that had been stable around him started to unravel. The rune-light clinging to his armor flickered as if it were being heavily disrupted, bright one moment and dim the next.

Because Zyraeth knew exactly what that sword meant.

Back then, Valtheron had used it to conquer all of Elysion Prime.

He’d used it to beat Zyraeth again and again until defeat became routine.

And because of that sword, Valtheron had gained a kind of existence that was almost impossible to truly kill.

Later, Zyraeth had finally managed to bring Valtheron down through schemes and traps—but even then, he still hadn’t been able to finish him off. All he could do was seal him away in the deepest underground.

And now—

The sword was back.

So when Valtheron held it again, the fear in Zyraeth’s eyes was driven to its absolute limit.

He sucked in a few rough breaths and kept retreating, almost purely on instinct, slipping farther and farther back. Before long, he was already at the edge of the sky.

But before he could force out his next move—

The sword came down.

Almost the instant the sword came down, Zyraeth forcibly drew all his power inward.

Every rune across his chest, shoulders, back, arms—and across the surface of his battle armor—flared at the same time. The Primordial Force that had been roiling and scattering around him was yanked in by brute force, coiling around his body in layers until it condensed into a barrier so thick it was nearly physical.

It looked unbreakable.

Energy compressed on energy, stacked until it resembled a fortress hastily raised in the sky. Fine, dense rune patterns drifted across its surface like living script.

But in the next beat, when Valtheron’s greatsword truly fell—

That "fortress" didn’t last even half a breath.

A shriek of splitting metal and shattering force tore through the air—

And the barrier was cleaved to pieces on the spot.

Fragments of energy blasted outward in every direction, like an invisible hand had ripped it open from the center and flung the remains away.

Zyraeth was hammered backward by that single strike. His body went completely out of control, hurtling away until he slammed into a distant mountain ridge.

The whole mountain shook.

Rock cracked and slid. Dust and rubble boiled into the air, burying half of Zyraeth’s body under falling stone.

Valtheron didn’t give him even a sliver of breathing room.

He didn’t pause. He simply swung the greatsword and drove in again.

He moved so fast no one could track the path—only a streak wrapped in golden runes and Primordial Force cutting across the sky, and then he was already in front of Zyraeth.

"Wait!"

Zyraeth shouted—sharp, sudden, nothing like the arrogant posture he’d worn before.

At the same time, he snatched something from his body—an object like a badge or insignia—and thrust it toward Valtheron.

The moment it appeared, a lot of people’s eyes tightened.

"This world was yours to begin with," Zyraeth gasped, words spilling out fast, rushed enough to sound almost desperate. "I can give it back to you—just spare my life!"

Valtheron stared at the insignia, and his expression didn’t move even a fraction.

If anything, it was like he’d just heard a joke so absurd it didn’t deserve a real reaction. A thin trace of ridicule flickered in his eyes.

Then—

His power swelled violently.

The greatsword in his hands didn’t hesitate for even an instant. Wrapped in the Primordial Force of the entire world, it came down hard.

The blade punched straight through Zyraeth’s heart.

For a heartbeat, it felt like heaven and earth went silent.

Then Zyraeth’s face twisted.

Fear. Agony. Disbelief. Everything hit him at once, piling onto his expression until it broke into something ugly and raw.

He looked down at his chest.

The greatsword had pierced clean through him, jutting out from his back. The golden runes along the blade lit up in layers, pinning his armor, his flesh, and every last trace of power inside him together like a cruel nail.

Cracks began to appear across him—fast.

They weren’t just surface splits in muscle and skin. They tore along his neck, his chest, his abdomen, down his limbs, spreading like a web that wanted to pull him apart from the inside out.

And the worst part—

Even his soul, not yet fully separated from his body, was severed by that strike—cut brutally into two.