Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 88: Father and Daughter: The Ground Becomes an Arena

Chapter 88: Father and Daughter: The Ground Becomes an Arena

The sand spat me back into the night like a weary beast rejecting a shard of bone too hard to digest. My breath escaped in ragged gasps, hoarse, as if the air itself was leaking out of me drop by drop. My heart beat—but no longer in rhythm. It thudded out of sync, with that dreadful slowness, like a poorly tuned drum in a war symphony.

The poison, devious and true to its purpose, continued its work.

It didn’t explode. It crept. An invisible tide, slow, methodical, slipping into my veins like a river of black ink, icy and merciless. With each pulse, I felt my muscles harden then grow heavier, as if the world clung to me, determined to lock me inside my own body. My thoughts, once sharp as silver blades, now flickered like lanterns in a fog too thick. Clarity was fleeing me. And yet...

I held.

I held because I had to. Because it was her. Because in this night of gold and death, I refused to fall before seeing her through to the end.

And she advanced.

Lysara.

With slow, measured, sovereign steps.

Her feet left no trace. The sand beneath her submitted. It smoothed beneath her, as if it no longer dared to record the imprint of what she had become. She did not walk—she glided. She devoured space, reshaping it with every step. And around her, her armor pulsed. Noctiferous. Alive. A carapace of shadow and power, forged from dark matter and raw will.

Each plate throbbed with an inner light, faint but constant. A heartbeat. A breath. As if the armor itself shared her breathing, her fury, her calm. She was a dual entity, fused with her metal, a silhouette born of war, of blood, and of my own legacy.

And she was magnificent.

Terrifying.

Invulnerable.

There, beneath the pale starlight cast over us, she stood like a living statue, sculpted from the night by divine hands. Her presence radiated something inconceivable—a cold, naked majesty, beyond question.

A star-born demon.

Yes.

My demon.

My creation.

My daughter.

I spun my twin sabers, their blades carving two silver crescents through the night air, sharp as forgotten oaths. The metal sang, impatient. And so I lunged. My body, still slowed by poison, answered the call of combat by reflex, by habit, by instinct. And she...

She struck.

No hesitation. No delay.

Our weapons met in a clash that shattered the silence. Hammer against blades. Mass against finesse. Raw force against sharpened dance. With each impact, the desert trembled. The blows were not mere sounds—they were muted explosions, thunderclaps resonating through the dunes like ancient warnings.

My left arm buckled under a single assault. I felt the joint protest, scream, flirt with rupture. But I held. She staggered back a step under a crossing parry, momentarily unbalanced, just enough to breathe. But the pause never came.

Each blow summoned the next. Every gained second grew more precious. The rhythm quickened. Our steps engraved the sand. Our weapons pulverized it.

I knew.

I couldn’t break her armor. Not head-on. Not force against force. It was too well-forged, too alive, too bound to her. A wall of beating obsidian, a second skin that absorbed fury without ever yielding.

So... I adapted.

My saber trembled. My breath deepened. Then, without flinching, I opened a thin cut in my own palm. The gesture was precise, ancient, almost ritual. An offering. A key. My blood spilled—dark, dense, saturated with energy—and ran down my blades like a slow, burning rain.

It sizzled.

Then, gently, as if awakened by an old memory, it began to glow.

Crimson. Pulsing. Alive.

Blood manipulation.

My oldest companion. My most loyal weapon.

The blood no longer flowed. It obeyed.

It stretched. It coiled. It formed around my sabers a shifting aura, vibrating with will. Each spray became a blade of its own. Each spark a weapon. Each drop, a trap.

I left a thread behind.

Invisible. Silent. Treacherous.

Then I attacked.

A frontal feint. Direct. Too direct. She parried powerfully, confident, regal in her defense. Exactly as I’d hoped.

Then I slipped.

To the side, fast as a shadow peeled from the earth, my arc of blood slithering through the air like a hungry serpent. It coiled.

Around her leg.

Slowly. Precisely. Irrefutably.

— Caught...

My voice was just a whisper.

But it carried.

Like a verdict.

I pulled.

Violently. Brutally. With all the fury my numbed muscles could still offer. The blood-thread, taut like a violin string, vibrated with lethal tension, and the trap snapped shut. Her balance was broken—I felt it, I saw it. Her body tilted slightly, just enough to break the axis of stability. A fraction of a second of imbalance, a single breath enough to cause a fall.

But...

Her armor.

That cursed, living, intelligent Noctifer.

It adapted.

Before my eyes, the dark plates of her armor quivered, slid, subtly extended. They sank into the ground like liquid claws, fusing with the hot sand in a muffled scrape. The impact was absorbed. The fall, aborted. She rose—not through brute strength, but through tectonic cunning. As if the earth itself had refused to let her fall.

And in the same motion, fluid, magnificent, she spun her hammer.

Like a black comet.

The handle carved a burning circle in the air, a halo of raw power, a crescent of death suspended from her hand. The wind alone would have shattered an unprepared chest. She struck with all her rage, all her beauty, all that brutal grace she had earned over many moons.

But I...

I slid.

I ducked at the last moment, breath stolen by the force of the blow, hair brushed by the shadow of death. My body slipped beneath the infernal arc, skimming the ground in a smooth, silent glide.

And I struck.

A clean cut, swift, direct, aimed at her ribs—the weak gap between two armor segments. My blades screamed as they struck metal.

Clang.

The sound echoed, heavy, deep, almost painful. A groan of metal, not a break. Not a victory.

The Noctifer held.

I recoiled, panting, feet carving twin furrows in the sand as I tried to stop my retreat. My breath came short, chaotic, harsher than it should’ve. My muscles trembled, vibrating from exertion, consumed by heat, fatigue, and the poison still climbing, slowly, methodically, through me.

I felt it gnawing at my strength. Corroding my speed. Eroding my will.

But my eyes...

My eyes still shone.

Not with pride. Not with defiance.

But with pride.

With clarity.

And with a fierce love for the one who had brought me this far... this close to the abyss.

She had stopped.

A breath.

A heartbeat.

Just enough for time to hesitate, for the desert to hold its breath with her. She didn’t move. Her arms, still tense from the effort, were frozen. Her armor pulsed slowly, as if listening. And her eyes... her eyes burned into mine, with that calm, almost tender intensity that had nothing of a challenge. It was an observation. A sentence.

— You’re tiring, Dad.

Her voice was soft. Slow. No triumph in it. Just a truth, delivered without cruelty.

I let a silence pass.

My body screamed. Every muscle rang like a funeral bell, every joint threatened to give out, and the poison etched its paralytic lines through me like a slow fire web. But I showed none of it. I straightened a little, exhaled through my nose, and replied.

With that light, almost careless tone that only comes from abyssal fatigue and steel will:

— You’re holding your own. I’m proud of you.

A smile crossed my lips. Thin. Pale. But real.

— Now... let’s see if your armor can read the future.

I bent down. Slowly. As if I were in no rush. As if I already knew the next moment would be decisive.

My blade sank into the ground with a muffled sound. The rasp of obsidian against sand. But it wasn’t just a gesture. It was a key.

And the world around her changed.

The sand contracted.

Then gave way.

Suddenly, without warning.

A silent collapse, sharp, irreversible.

For from the beginning, from the first steps of this dance of fire and blood, I had sown the seeds. Small pieces of wood marked with minor runes, hidden beneath the sand using my own blood, placed one by one with each shift, each retreat, each contact with the ground. Drawn slowly from my magic pouch, infused, planted, forgotten. One by one. Until they formed a pattern. A structure.

And now, that network activated.

A lattice of spikes, shards, hidden axes, forming the invisible base of a patient trap.

Beneath her feet, the ground fractured.

The sand, once an accomplice, became a traitor.

It contracted, opened, flowed like a tongue stolen by the depths.

An artificial cavern—carved by will, stabilized by blood, amplified by runic engraving. A fault. A chasm built on ancient gestures. On foresight. On my experience.

And she... fell.

Her body tipped silently into the void. A shadow swallowed by the mute throat of the earth. And in that rifted silence, in the scream the desert never gave...

I remained upright.

One knee to the ground.

Arm extended toward the soil.

Eyes fixed on the place where she had vanished.

I dove after her.

A streak of fire in the night, my body propelled by the last spasm of my will, by that final wave of momentum that comes before total exhaustion. My twin sabers tore through the air, ready to cut through anything that still stood—flesh, stone, armor, or fate. Around me, my blood, sharpened into a swarm of floating blades, followed like a pack of starving serpents. Every drop vibrated with slicing desire, suspended between obedience and hunger for victory.

My eyes burned. With tension. With clarity. With fatigue.

My muscles, they screamed.

And at the bottom of the chasm... there was a beat.

A dull thump. Deep. A metallic pulse belonging neither to her nor to me, but to something in between. Something older. More inhuman.

The Noctifer.

It reacted.

Like a wounded, furious beast, it tightened around her. The dark, living plates formed a dome, a cocoon, an obsidian egg glowing faintly—not to protect her, but to hold her, transform her. The metal throbbed, folded in on itself, breathed with a sinister rhythm, as if it were swallowing the fall only to spit it back out stronger.

And then...

A rumble.

Muffled, from the depths.

Then the explosion.

A muted detonation, hot, saturated with raw energy. The ground shook beneath my feet, the air shoved back in a violent burst, a wave of heat hit me like a molten shield. My body was thrown back, caught by the surge of power born from the depths. My blood-blades shattered, broken by the pressure. My sabers scraped across the sand, clawing the rock like torn talons.

And she...

She emerged.

Standing.

Motionless. Unkillable. Irrefutable.

Lysara’s silhouette rose from the crater like a war goddess, molded from fire and ash. The Noctifer cloaked her body with brutal grace, its plates darker than ever, streaked with glowing red impulses, like captive lightning running under metal skin.

And in her hand... her hammer.

Transformed.

The massive head, oozing energy, now striped with red veins, vibrant, as if struck by volcanic rage. Red arcs ran along its surface, screeching, unstable, as if the weapon itself now refused all limits.

I fell.

To my knees.

Not from weakness. Not entirely. But because my body couldn’t go on. My muscles numbed, my nerves twisted in pain, my breath became a rasp, short, gasping, fragile.

But I smiled.

Yes, even here. Even now.

My lips bled, cracked from effort, from impact, from blows. But they still curled into a fierce smile.

And my eyes...

My eyes burned.

With admiration. With pride. With that feral joy only real battles, real falls, real students can give.

My Lysara.

She was here.

Greater than anything I had imagined.

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