Single for Eternity
Chapter 115. Guardian? (2)

Chapter 115: 115. Guardian? (2)

The next moment, our fists collided with a thunderous crack, the shockwave humming in the air like a live wire.

Neither of us moved.

It was a deadlock — force against force, power against power.

Then the silence shattered.

We launched into a brutal flurry of strikes, each attack more savage than the last. The very air distorted around us as limbs blurred, punches cut through the wind, and the ground cracked beneath our feet.

He drove a vicious hook toward my liver. I twisted, just narrowly avoiding it, and countered with a crushing elbow to his ribs.

The hit landed with full force — but nothing happened.

No flinch. No stagger. Just empty, undead stillness.

Before I could blink, he raised a knee, aiming to slam it into my skull.

I crossed my arms just in time.

BAM!

The impact tore through my symbiote armor, hairline fractures rippling through the living black shell. Pain jolted up my arms, but the damage was manageable — minimized thanks to the symbiote’s reactive shielding.

Then, without warning, he grabbed me by the waist and hurled me across the room.

I spun mid-air, flipping around and latching onto his remaining arm before he could retract it.

"Your mistake," I muttered, eyes narrowing.

A crimson haze surged down my arm. Chaos. A fragment of it, concentrated and hungry. The red mist curled like a serpent and burrowed into his undead flesh.

The reaction was immediate.

His body spasmed violently, a wet, strangled groan slipping from his throat. His form convulsed as the chaotic energy rippled through his limb like wildfire.

And then—

CRACK!

His arm twisted unnaturally before exploding into fragmented bone and rotting tissue. The sickening crunch echoed across the stone walls.

More importantly — the undead aether surrounding the limb shattered. It didn’t heal. No regeneration, no reformation.

That’s when realization struck.

"He’s not regenerating," I whispered.

His body wasn’t alive. It wasn’t even functioning like a normal undead. He was being held together — animated — purely by undead aether, like a puppet made of scraps.

And I had just severed the strings.

I dropped to the floor with a grunt, landing in a low stance. He staggered backward, visibly stunned. He looked at the empty space where his arm used to be, confusion radiating off of him in waves.

Then came the second wave of realization.

Chaos. The remnant of it inside my attack had disrupted the structure of his aether — it was still eating at his form, distorting the patterns and leaving scars that wouldn’t vanish.

The symbiote hissed in sync with my thoughts, crimson veins glowing along the armor’s surface.

I flexed my fingers, a wicked grin forming on my face.

"Let’s see you try that again."

But he didn’t attack.

Instead, he glared at me with wild, hate-filled eyes — and then his entire body folded inward, curling up like a dying creature.

"What the hell...?"

BOOM.

He detonated, erupting into a cloud of decaying meat, bone shrapnel, and dense necrotic smoke. The blast sent debris flying, and I shielded my face, stepping back cautiously.

The thick, noxious mist engulfed the chamber.

Then — footsteps.

Slow. Steady.

The smoke began to part.

And from within it emerged something... new.

No — something reborn.

His form had changed completely.

Where once he was ragged, hunched, and feral, now he stood tall — imposing. Bone-like blades jutted from his back in a fan-shaped array, forming a twisted mockery of angelic wings. They shifted with a faint clicking, exuding power and malice.

His limbs had been reforged, armored in jet-black bone plates etched with pulsing crimson lines. His entire body radiated undead aether, but this time it was... refined. Condensed. Sharpened.

His face was hidden beneath a seamless skeletal mask, fused into his skull — devoid of expression, save for the glowing red eyes that bored into mine with predatory focus.

Gone was the screeching brute.

This was a weapon.

No—this was a reaper.

"Second form," I muttered, narrowing my eyes.

He didn’t move.

Instead, the walls moved.

Stone groaned around us as the chamber began to shift — grinding inward, the battlefield shrinking. He stood perfectly still at the center, arms outstretched, waiting.

Like he was preparing to embrace me.

Or bury me.

My symbiote hissed in defiance, and I felt its armor tighten around me, readying for the next assault.

I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck, flexed my arms with chaotic energy in my hand.

"Alright then..."

My voice echoed in the tightening space.

"...Let’s dance."

...

And dance we did.

The confined space became my stage. I turned the enclosing walls into a dance floor, ricocheting off them with practiced ease.

Every leap, every glide, every twist of my body served a purpose—each motion a prelude to violence.

The one draped in the fur coat, now in his grotesque new form, stalked the center of the room. His appearance had changed—more monstrous, more warped—but it was all bark and no bite.

Beneath that sinister guise, he was still stitched together by undead aether. Fragile, unstable. And worst of all, predictable.

He was vulnerable.

My body, shrouded in Chaos aether, radiated a crimson mist that clung to me like a second skin. It shimmered like blood in the moonlight, hissing softly with power.

With that, I moved—an arc of motion slicing across the air, launching from wall to wall like a specter of vengeance.

Every pass brought with it an opportunity.

A strike here. A slice there.

His elongated, bone-like limbs stretched out from beneath his cape-like wings, desperate to catch me.

They tried—oh, how they tried—but the moment they made contact, they disintegrated into nothing but red vapor. Aether meeting Chaos. They never stood a chance.

The room grew tighter, the walls inching closer. But that only made me faster. The more confined the space, the more momentum I could build with each bounce.

My speed increased with every rebound until I was little more than a crimson blur—an afterimage of rage.

He couldn’t keep up.

His obsidian eyes darted frantically, head jerking left and right, trying to anticipate my next strike.

But I was already gone by the time he reacted. He was always one breath behind, always swinging at shadows.

And still, I kept going.

Because stopping... stopping would’ve meant collapsing. The nausea was crawling up my throat from all the spinning, the speed.

I felt like vomiting with every heartbeat. My head was swimming, my stomach twisted in knots.

But I didn’t stop.

I couldn’t.

So I danced.

Moving. Hitting.

Moving. Hitting.

Hitting. And hitting.

Each blow chipped away at his form. The red mist that engulfed him thickened with every hit, swallowing his figure in a vortex of corruption.

His once-proud obsidian armor, which had gleamed with a dull malevolence, now sizzled—bubbling as if boiling from the inside out.

And then—finally—it began to drip.

The armor melted, liquefied like wax beneath an open flame. The black sludge sloughed off him in gory chunks, revealing the raw, scorched skin underneath.

It was... grotesque.

Familiar.

I had seen this before—in the murals etched across the stone walls of the ruin.

This was the same burning, the same agony portrayed when he had been burned by the bark of the colossal tree by the parents of Malthorn. He screamed.

It was poetic.... kind of.

His end, again was similar to how he was once ended. It almost felt as if he was destined to die that way....that same exact excruciatingly painful way.

And if actually was destiny.... I didn’t want to think about it.

A deep, blood-curdling shriek that reverberated through my bones. It was the kind of sound that could shatter minds if you listened too long.

It carried sorrow, pain, desperation—a million kinds of suffering compressed into one howl.

But I felt nothing.

No fear. No pity.

Just stillness.

I inhaled, slow and deep, tasting the aether in the air. It was thick now—especially the crimson strands.

As if answering my unspoken call, the Chaos aether around me gathered, shifting, shimmering... revealing itself. It danced before my eyes, no longer hidden from sight.

I raised my hand.

He knelt, twitching in agony.

The red aether clustered at my palm, coalescing into a sphere—an orb of condensed chaos, lightning flickering beneath its surface like a caged storm. It hummed with power, vibrating against my skin like a living heart.

I thrust my arm forward.

The orb obeyed.

It sailed through the air like judgment incarnate, colliding with his broken body in a blaze of light and sound.

The moment of impact detonated like thunder, consuming him in a flash of red fury. His screams reached a final, unbearable pitch—his body bubbling again, this time grotesquely expanding.

Swelling. Twitching.

And then, like an overfilled balloon—

Pop.

Gore splattered the walls. The remnants of whatever he was rained down like sick confetti.

Then... silence.

The enclosing walls retracted, space returning to the room as if the tension had finally exhaled. A door materialized, the way forward now open.

I stood there, panting—shoulders heaving, limbs trembling.

And with a bitter exhale, I muttered, "Well... that was anticlimactic."