Exiled Prince: I'm the Unexpected Extra in the Novel-Chapter 154: The Clash of Princes [4]

The War for The North [42]

Chapter 154: Ashes of the Undying Fire

Aethrax couldn’t hold back the metallic taste climbing up his throat and vomited blood in black clots onto the ground.

He brought his trembling hands to his face, then looked at his arms in horror.

Pitch-black veins moving under his skin were woven like a web.

"What did you do to me... you vile coward!" he snarled, his voice coming out raspy due to the burning in his rib cage.

Cassian responded to this outburst with only a cold, expressionless face.

He was walking towards him, dragging the pitch-black sword formed of chaos flames, its edges flickering, across the ground.

The thin, annoying scratching sound made every time the tip of the sword touched a stone, combined with Cassian’s rhythmic, calm steps, was straining Aethrax’s sanity, which was already hanging by a thread.

Cassian stood at Aethrax’s head. His shadow fell over the massive bulk kneeling on the ground.

He slowly raised the sword into the air, its tip aiming for Aethrax’s neck.

"You don’t need to know," said Cassian, his voice carrying a cold judgment. "Because... You will be dead in a moment."

In the millisecond Cassian lowered the sword, Aethrax’s survival instinct overtook his logic. "NOOO!"

Aethrax shouted so loud that his voice echoed in the mountains.

At the same time, he directed his own essence, the [Undying Fire], into his body, into the deepest parts of his veins.

His own flame began to burn his body from the inside out. The blood in his veins bubbled, his skin shone with a crimson light, and the black veins sizzled and vanished against this extreme heat.

When Cassian’s descending sword hit this intense heat wave, it hung in the air.

Aethrax gathered his last strength with a scream tearing his throat and managed to parry the sword to the side with a wave of flame exploding from his palms.

He straightened up on his knees with difficulty.

He opened his right palm and struck Cassian’s chest with unavoidable speed.

WHAM!

Cassian’s body was hurled backward, creating ripples in the air from the impact to his chest.

He tried to recover just before his back hit the rocks, but Aethrax had already lunged after him. Tearing through the air like a crimson meteor, he pounced on Cassian.

Aethrax clasped his two hands together, raised them into the air like a massive sledgehammer, and brought them down with all his might on Cassian lying on the ground.

However, the moment the blow was about to make contact, Cassian’s body once again turned into black smoke.

The smoke slipped through Aethrax’s fingers and escaped by entering the cracks in the soil.

Aethrax roared in anger. "COME OUT!"

He pressed his hands against the soil and began to scorch the ground. The soil heated up until it reached the consistency of lava. But Cassian wasn’t there.

Hundreds of black lightning bolts, each as thick as a spear, fell upon Aethrax.

As soon as Aethrax sensed the lightning, he expanded his aura like a dome and blocked them.

Explosions left him in a cloud of dust. When the smoke cleared, Aethrax looked around and his eyes widened in shock.

"W-what is happening?!"

Around him stood dozens, no, hundreds of Cassians encircling him. All were in [Sovereign Form].

All of their eyes shone with the same red ember, and they all radiated the same suffocating chaotic aura.

Aethrax gritted his teeth. He had marked him with his mana before; he should be able to find the real one.

He sharpened his senses but to no avail... They all radiated the same mana. They all smelled the same. They were all identical.

"This is impossible..." he whispered. "They can’t all be real... THEY SHOULDN’T BE!"

For the first time in thousands of years, Aethrax began to feel that forgotten emotion, ’true fear,’ in his marrow.

The unshakable arrogance and desire for battle inside him were leaving their place to involuntarily trembling hands and cold sweats.

He was a Prince. He had lived in this world for thousands of years, toppled kingdoms, burned armies.

He had never lost until now. But now? Now, he was losing against a newly emerged rookie brat of unknown origin.

"No..." he said to himself. "My thousands of years cannot end with such a ridiculous death. I do not accept this! I WILL WIN!"

Aethrax reached a speed that exceeded all his limits, one that would tear his body apart. Suddenly he appeared in front of the nearest Cassian.

He tore the clone’s head from its body with his bare hands, then turned and plunged his fist into the chest of another.

The clones were exploding into black smoke, but the Cassians weren’t stopping.

Dozens of spells coming at him, chains of chaos... Aethrax exploded his mana like a bomb, stopping them all and burning them with his flames.

He didn’t stop. He grabbed a clone’s leg and used it to hit another.

He tore another’s throat with his teeth. The battlefield had turned into a slaughterhouse where Aethrax spun like a frenzied hurricane.

Every second a clone disappeared, but Aethrax’s power was also depleting.

Finally, Aethrax burned the last clone to ash. He was surrounded by black smoke, out of breath. His chest was heaving like bellows.

"IT’S ALL OVER!" he shouted, his voice hoarse. "WHERE ARE YOU, YOU COWARD! FACE ME!"

At that moment, with an instinctive impulse, he hesitantly turned his head upwards.

There he was.

The Prince of Nothingness was floating at the very top of the sky. He was very far away, looking like a small black dot. But something was wrong. The color of the air had changed.

Aethrax narrowed his eyes and looked more carefully at the sky. And at that moment, he felt his blood freeze.

There was no moon.

Or rather, there was a huge, massive black mass covering the front of the moon.

It was so big that it was indescribable. The small black holes used throughout the battle couldn’t be compared to this.

Aethrax’s eyes widened in horror. The truth hit him in the face like a slap.

The Prince of Nothingness hadn’t truly fought him in the literal sense.

Those evasive fights, small scratches, clones... Everything he did was just to buy time.

Everything he did was to prepare this disaster in the sky. He had been planning this since the very beginning of the battle.

Every wound he took, every fake step he took, all that evasive warfare... It was all for this moment.

"He played... with me..." whispered Aethrax.

He was frozen in place. All his cells were screaming ’RUN!’. He knew that if he didn’t run, if he got under that thing, he would be erased down to his atoms.

It was impossible for him to stop that attack. The damn black flames had been advantageous against him from the very beginning anyway. Stopping an attack of this magnitude now? Impossible.

Aethrax laughed. He threw his head back and began to laugh as if he had lost his mind.

"AHAHAHAHAHA!"

He clenched his fists, fixed his eyes on the massive black sphere.

"You fought like a coward until the very last moment, Prince of Nothingness! But I... I DO NOT RUN!"

The massive black mass in the sky shrank, compressed, and densified. As it shrank, the pressure it radiated crushed the world.

Aethrax gathered all his mana, his soul, his life force. He tensed his legs. His body radiated a heat that scorched the earth; snow, trees, stones, whatever was within a few kilometers burned to ash. The earth was about to turn into hell.

He would not run. He hadn’t fought for thousands of years just to die here. He hadn’t even realized his dream yet.

"BRING IT ON!"

The black mass suddenly exploded. A dense stream of chaos covering the entire sky flowed down towards Aethrax to turn the world into nothingness.

Aethrax shot up into the sky. Like a flame arrow, he went towards the darkness. Screaming, roaring, he advanced.

He drove his own wave of hell towards the flood of chaos descending from the sky.

The moment the two powers met in the air, time bent.

The first explosion was silent. Light and darkness ate each other. The shockwave that followed shaved off the peaks of the mountains.

Aethrax’s flames tried to enter the black hole, to burn it. "BURN! BURN! BURN!" he screamed in his mind.

But the chaos... Chaos was hungry. It swallowed Aethrax’s flames. It absorbed his anger, his power, his existence.

A second explosion occurred. Aethrax felt himself drowning inside his own flames. Black flames breached his skin, touched his soul.

And finally, Aethrax’s [Undying Fire] fell defeated. It was held, wrapped, and squeezed by chaos.

As chaos embraced him, Aethrax’s mind blurred.

There was no pain, only a cold nothingness. Thousands of years passed before his eyes. Wars, victories, destructions...

As his consciousness shut down, he thought. What was my dream?

When silence returned, the earth looked as if it had suffered the wrath of a god.

A massive crater made of vitrified soil, extending for kilometers and thousands of meters deep, had opened up. Neither snow nor mountain remained. There was not a single sign of life.

Only two objects lay on the smoking ground in the very center of the crater.

One was a broken, shattered sword-like staff lying on the ground. The tip of the staff had melted, only the sword-like handle remained, and even the handle was full of deep cracks, the light inside it extinguished.

And the other... Was a white-haired, red-eyed boy.

Cassian was lying on the ground, naked.

The [Sovereign Form] had dispersed.

It seemed as if there wasn’t a single intact bone left in his body. His skin was burned in places, covered with black veins in others.

"Hah... hah..."

He was taking ragged breaths. His lungs burned with every breath.

Slowly, groaning, struggling, he tried to rise to his knees. But his body wouldn’t listen to him. His arms trembled, his legs wouldn’t hold.

Meanwhile, the still-hot ground was burning him. Even his unique regeneration skill had almost completely stopped; he had depleted his mana.

Cassian barely stood up, digging his nails into the soil. Stumbling, swaying left and right like a drunkard, he walked towards that broken sword, towards what remained of Aethrax.

His consciousness was about to shut down. The redness in his eyes was fading, wanting to leave its place to a blurry whiteness. The world was spinning.

But Cassian bit his tongue. He forced himself to maintain consciousness with the taste of blood filling his mouth.

"It’s not... over... yet..." he whispered with cracked lips.

He could feel it. The sword was still alive. There was still Aethrax’s essence in that broken piece, in that flimsy metal. He had to take it. He had to finish it.

Just as Cassian was about to reach the sword, reaching out his hand...

Suddenly, silently, as if created from nothingness, a woman appeared.

She stepped between the sword and Cassian.

She was wearing a strange, pure white, glowing dress.

Her face was hidden behind a thin, silk veil, her features indistinguishable. But her stance reflected an unshakable balance, an absolute authority even in the middle of this chaos.

The woman leaned down slowly. With her elegant, smooth hands, she gently picked up the broken sword, the remnant of Aethrax, from the ground.

She straightened up and turned towards Cassian.

Even though her face wasn’t visible, it was felt that she was watching Cassian from under the veil.

The woman’s voice possessed a divine and gentle tone; it harbored neither a threat nor anger. It was just absolute reality.

"That is enough for tonight, Prince of Nothingness."

"Return to your home."

Cassian’s eyes went black, then opened again. He wanted the sword. That victory was his.

"Give... it..." he snarled.

Cassian was almost about to faint. Even standing up was a miracle.

He forced his hand into a fist. He gathered all his strength, his last remaining will into that fist, and swung it towards the girl at a speed slower than even a snail.

The girl just gently took a step to the side. The punch went into the void.

Cassian seemed to lose his balance but didn’t fall.

He gritted his teeth. He took another step forward. He raised his trembling arm and, gathering his strength, threw another punch.

The woman took a step again. Gently, gliding, she retreated. Even the wind didn’t move her dress.

"What you are doing is meaningless," said the woman, her voice like the howling of the wind. "You cannot harm anyone right now. You have disrupted your balance, now you must rest."

He took another step forward. He swung his fist again. The girl stepped aside again.

Cassian continued to swing his fists senselessly, like a drunk man. Right, left, missing... Each time the woman dodged, flowing like water.

Finally, Cassian fell completely exhausted. His legs could carry him no more and he collapsed on his knees. He bowed his head. His breathing was wheezing.

His vision was darkening. He was about to give up.

At that moment, the shimmer of the moon struck inside the crater. The silvery light fell on Cassian’s sweaty and bloody back.

With his head turned back, he slowly turned to the sky.

The Moon... His silent friend. It was there again. Looking at him. With its bright, unblemished face, as if whispering to him to get up and fight.

Cassian’s pupils trembled. The ember inside him that was about to go out flared up with the moonlight.

He ground his teeth. He reached his hand towards the sword and the woman.

He forced his trembling legs and straightened up on his knees again. Stubbornly, angrily, he stood up.

The woman tilted her head slightly under the veil, as if pitying this effort.

"I told you, Prince of Nothingness," she said in a calm, educating tone. "What you are doing is meaningle-"

WHAM!

The end of the sentence didn’t come.

That exhausted fist... At the last moment, with a speed that disregarded the laws of physics, with a burst of ’lightning’, found its target.

The woman took the punch right in the middle of her face, under the veil, on her nose.

As her head snapped back, the divine stance broke. With her nose bleeding, she stumbled and fell on her butt onto the ground, into the ashes.

She brought her hand to her face in astonishment. Her veil had shifted, red blood leaking from her nose had dripped onto her white dress.

Cassian stood, his fist still in the air. His eyes shone with pure madness and satisfaction.

His own nose was bleeding too, even though he was the one who threw the punch; in fact, unlike the girl, Cassian’s nose was completely crushed.

He spat blood and said with his wheezing voice:

"Shut up, bitch!"