Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory-Chapter 1003: Fractured Sky

Watching from a distance, Ethan’s heart clenched on its own.

A clash at that level had already blown past everything he thought he understood about power.

The pressure saturating the air made breathing feel heavy. Every pulse of energy was like claws raking across his nerves.

But he forced himself steady.

This wasn’t the time to get distracted.

"Keep pushing!" he ordered under his breath, but his voice still carried across the battlefield. "Their strongest is pinned down. Everyone else—wipe them out!"

The moment the command landed, Emerald Castle’s army surged again.

Ethan was the first to move.

He cut through the air in a streak of lightning, closing on a massive mechanoid in the blink of an eye. The metal giant had just started to rotate when a bolt of white lightning smashed into its shoulder.

BOOM!

Energy detonated on contact.

Thunder raced along its frame with a harsh szzzt—, and the entire mechanical arm—along with half its torso—was ripped clean off.

Internal power conduits were exposed to open air. Sparks and current tangled violently. The mechanoid lost balance instantly and crashed down with a heavy slam.

The battlefield hit a new boiling point.

But this time, the advantage had completely tipped toward Emerald Castle.

Their offensive rolled forward like a flood. Nexaris’s line was torn open again and again, and no meaningful resistance could form.

Nexaris soldiers broke in waves. The battle was tilting at a visible speed.

High in the sky, Zerathrax’s brows drew tight.

He could feel it clearly: the snow-white energy Lily had released was suppressing his power perfectly. It wasn’t a simple gap in strength.

It was a deeper kind of counter.

And that feeling—

Made him deeply uneasy.

Meanwhile, Ethan had already plunged back into the crowd.

Several energy spheres formed in his hand, white lightning woven together with Infernal Primordial Power. When he threw them one after another, each explosion ripped open a fresh gap in the enemy ranks.

Flesh and energy burst across the air.

The battlefield slipped toward total chaos.

But just as Ethan prepared to drive deeper—

"Wmmm—"

A strange, resonant hum sounded right in front of him.

A figure appeared with no warning at all.

The man floated there quietly, yet his aura was brutally violent. Embedded around his neck were three ice-blue gemstones. Their light was cold and deep, like frozen cores of absolute winter.

They didn’t feel like ordinary energy cores.

They felt... other.

"You’re the lord of Emerald Castle?" The voice came—but not from his mouth. It echoed out of the three gemstones at once, layered with an eerie resonance. "Didn’t expect you’d be nothing but a weak human."

Ethan’s nerves snapped tight.

He took a reflexive step back, already gathering a massive energy sphere in his palm. White lightning and Infernal Primordial Power compressed wildly, forming an extremely unstable core.

No hesitation.

He threw it.

But right before it could hit—

Three ice-blue beams shot out.

Perfectly precise.

They converged in midair and struck the sphere dead center.

And then something unbelievable happened.

The raging energy sphere froze solid in the air.

Not just the surface.

Even the energy flow inside it was completely locked—sealed in place like time itself had been iced over.

Ethan’s pupils shrank hard.

That was Infernal Primordial Power.

And it had been suppressed that easily.

No time to think.

He switched tactics immediately, yanking a sealed energy core out of his storage space and encasing it inside a spatial sphere before hurling it straight at the target.

The instant the two forces touched, they reacted violently.

Space twisted.

A bizarre vortex formed between them. Power churned and cross-cut inside it, until it tore open a dimensional fissure. The surrounding spatial structure collapsed fast, the crack spreading outward and dragging everything toward it.

The enemy clearly hadn’t seen that coming.

His body was yanked by the spatial turbulence, thrown off balance—and in the next heartbeat, he was pulled into the rift.

Ethan didn’t waste the opening.

He lunged forward, compressing everything he had into his fist.

Then—

He drove it down.

BOOM!

Half the man’s body burst apart from the impact. Flesh and energy were shredded to nothing inside the dimensional tear. What remained didn’t even get a chance to struggle before the spatial turbulence swallowed it completely.

On the other side of the battlefield—

The roar of impact came in nonstop waves.

Lily and Zerathrax’s fight had already sunk into a deeper layer of space.

Their power kept colliding, ripping open fracture after fracture. Then, in one especially violent exchange, the entire region tore wide—forming a massive rift that led into a dimensional abyss.

Both of them were dragged in at the same time.

And even inside that dimensional space, the fight didn’t stop.

It got worse.

Spatial vortices were born around them, collapsed, then reformed again and again. Power amplified inside that unstable zone, to the point it started bleeding into the real sky.

Cloud layers were shredded.

Light warped.

The whole canopy of heaven looked like it might cave in at any second.

And the battle—

Kept escalating.

Ethan didn’t spare another thought for anything else.

With Lily keeping Zerathrax pinned in that near-collapsing high altitude, Ethan seized the chance. He led Emerald Castle’s forces in a near one-sided purge of what was left of Nexaris’s legion.

White lightning, golden energy, blades, cannons—everything laced together under a broken sky. Without unified command, Nexaris troops started collapsing almost immediately, retreating in pieces.

It didn’t last long.

Their formation had already been wrecked, and under relentless pressure it finally snapped. The mechanoids, without coordination, became clumsy hulks—dismantled and shot down one after another. The remaining living troops were butchered fast as panic spread through them.

When the last meaningful pocket of resistance was erased, Ethan didn’t pause for even a moment.

He shot straight up.

At this point, the "sky" barely qualified as a sky anymore.

Lily and Zerathrax’s fight had torn the entire space into ragged fragments. Light refracted through warped cracks. Darkness and thunder, abyss and white radiance, flashed in alternating bands, making the world look like a collapsing alien realm.

Every collision peeled another layer off an already unstable reality.

In that environment, Ethan quickly locked onto Zerathrax’s position.

He drew a deep breath and forced all his power into a single point. White lightning and Infernal Primordial Power spun violently in his palm, compressing into a massive, heavy, unstable energy sphere.

Fine cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, popping and sparking like it could detonate early at any instant.

Then Ethan snapped his arm.

The sphere punched through a twisted spatial fracture and slammed with perfect accuracy into Zerathrax’s abdomen—

Right where his energy core was.

A brutally muffled blast sounded.

Zerathrax’s body jerked hard. The impact—compressed to the absolute limit—detonated inward the moment it connected, hammering a massive crater into his abdomen. Carapace and flesh split together in the same instant.