Ancestral Lineage - Chapter 451

Chapter 451: Strength of the First Primord (3)

Reality narrowed around Ethan until the world existed only as fragments… shards of sensation, shards of pain, shards of memory.

Every sound was muffled, as though he were underwater. Every breath tasted of iron and frost. Every heartbeat felt like a hammer striking cracked stone.

Leon wasn’t attacking him with simple blows anymore. These weren’t claws or ice or chaos. These were concepts slamming into Ethan’s existence. Saints fought with the essence of what they were. Leon’s Path of Chaos wasn’t breaking Ethan’s body now.

It was breaking… Ethan.

A whispering wave of dread energy swept over him, and Ethan felt something inside him tear… no sound, no pain, just a sensation like a piece of himself had been snatched away and erased. His memory of warmth. His memory of laughter. His memory of the scent of his daughter’s hair.

It vanished.

Another attack landed, this time a spiraling spear of conceptual frost. It didn’t pierce his chest. It pierced his identity.

For the smallest moment, Ethan forgot who he was.

Not as a Saint.

Not as a fighter.

Not as a Primord.

But as a husband.

He felt the memory slipping like sand through broken fingers. Pisces. Lisa. Harley. Clara. Carmen. Barki. Asteria. Andriel. Seraphis. Vaeloria. Christel. Elaine. All twelve faces blurred into a white fog. The panic that surged in response nearly stopped his heart altogether.

His one remaining eye widened, trembling.

“…no… don’t…”

His voice rasped like a dying animal.

Leon’s next attack came… not a strike but a wave of pressure so heavy the ground collapsed into a crater beneath Ethan’s body. His bones cracked under the weight. His ribs snapped completely, white fragments jutting out like broken wings trying to escape his flesh.

His leg, already mangled, twisted again, tendons snapping like wet cords. His severed shoulder burned, the frost creeping deeper. His blind eye leaked tears of blood, the nerves still screaming even though sight was gone.

Leon hovered above him, slowly drifting downward like a god descending to deliver judgment. The Chaos Avatar moved behind him, mirroring him; a colossal shadow of the same malice.

They raised their hands together.

The world shattered.

A beam of raw chaos struck Ethan… too fast to dodge, too vast to survive.

It devoured light.

It crushed sound.

It stripped color from the world.

Ethan’s body flung through ten layers of frozen space like a rag doll. He hit the ground, so the land folded downward… dirt, stone, and even the air collapsing around him.

Another chunk of himself vanished.

His sense of touch… gone for three seconds… returned as agony.

He tried to breathe. His lungs screamed. Something wet bubbled in his throat.

He coughed.

Blood poured out. More blood. Far too much blood.

His consciousness flickered; on, off, on, off, each flicker leaving him more hollow, more faded, more frayed.

Leon appeared behind him in the blink of an eye. A kick, casual, almost lazy, drove into Ethan’s spine.

CRACK!

Ethan’s vision exploded in white, then red, then nothing. His spine fractured in two places. His legs went numb. His arms curled inward, twitching.

He tried to lift his head. He couldn’t. He tried to move his clawed hands… they barely twitched.

“What’s wrong, Ethan?” Leon whispered in his ear, voice calm… too calm.

“Where is your pride? Where is your certainty? Where is your smile?”

No answer.

Ethan couldn’t speak anymore. His jaw barely moved. His throat didn’t respond.

Another memory shattered.

He forgot the first time Harley kissed him.

He forgot the warmth of Asteria holding him.

He forgot the sound of Pisces’s laugh.

He forgot the scene of Clara’s shyness.

His eye widened in terror as he realized what was happening. Leon wasn’t killing him. Leon was unmaking him. Stripping him down. Erasing him.

Dismantling his existence one delicate piece at a time.

Ethan felt himself thinning. Losing weight… not physically, but metaphysically. He felt like a sketch being erased stroke by stroke.

His aura flickered.

His core flickered.

His crown symbol, those interlocking rings, cracked again. The second ring dimmed. The third ring trembled like a dying star.

He could barely whisper, but the words forced their way out between bloody lips.

“…not… yet…”

Leon grabbed Ethan’s head by the hair and lifted his broken body effortlessly, letting his legs dangle limp. Ethan’s remaining hand tried to claw at Leon’s wrist, but the strength wasn’t there. It was the gesture of a man drowning, waving at ghosts.

Leon stared into Ethan’s single working eye.

“This is the moment you vanish.”

Then he slammed Ethan into the ground.

The planet buckled. The sky fractured. Space groaned.

Ethan lay there, his face half-buried in the dirt, his breaths shallow, his pulse weak and almost nonexistent.

He was fading.

Literally fading.

His outline flickered.His aura leaked away like smoke from a broken lantern.His heartbeat skipped once… twice… then slowed to a horrifying crawl.

For a moment, one awful, breathless moment, Ethan felt the edges of death brush against him.

Cold.Silent.Empty.

He wasn’t dying.

He was disappearing.

A man unmade.

A husband erased.

A father extinguished.

And far above him, twelve hearts shattered at the sight.

The world didn’t just pause.It bowed.

The shattered sky froze mid-crack.The ruptured earth stopped trembling.Leon’s Chaos Avatar stilled as if the universe held its breath.

Then, quietly, like the sigh of creation itself, came the voice.

“Sigh… it seems it’s time.”

It wasn’t loud.It didn’t need to be.

The voice washed over the battlefield with such absolute presence that even the fractured fabric of reality trembled to attention. Every atom, every concept, every law bowed under its weight.

“Don’t let me down, my disciple… my son.”

Leon’s eyes widened.His breath hitched.His heart stuttered like a broken machine.

Because that… wasn’t a mortal voice.That wasn’t a Saint’s voice.That wasn’t something the world should be able to hear and survive.

From Ethan’s half-erased chest, a tiny silver-gold pebble rose upward, humming with impossible resonance. It hovered above him like a star that had simply decided to be here and nowhere else.

A pulse of light rippled from it, turning the air into molten brilliance.

Leon staggered back, panic rising like bile.

Creation is hard, cheer me up!

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