Volume 1: Awakening—[Awakening Arc]
Chapter 12: Mist Demon vs. Tiger Mask
In the middle of the mirror world space, Caelus stood on the ground of flesh, his entire body drenched in blood.
His body didn't reek of blood, though it was as if the red substance wasn't truly blood at all.
The world around him began to fracture like cracked porcelain, spiderwebs of damage stretching through the sky and ground alike.
He didn't notice any of the things that were happening around him, as he couldn't right now. The rage he was in and the number of things he had done in those moments had drained his strength from his limbs to the upper body, and every drop of adrenaline had burned out.
His heart stopped working; his body was broken from bones to cells beyond function. Even though some parts regenerated during his desperate chewing on the sphere, it had only restored his teeth, not his arms, not his spine, not his ruined insides.
No ordinary person could survive this much pain and horror in a single day, and to add it all up, the body was being broken down and being repaired again and again, which led him to almost die from being drained of his strength and stamina.
The entire realm shattered further, glasslike shards drifting and disintegrating.
Then, a portal opened beneath Caelus. His body, still standing but hollow, collapsed and dropped into the glowing rift.
Above him, another body started falling down, which belonged to Uriel. Her form descended with eerie grace, still intact. Her body, which was in the orb, was outside as she fell down into the portal.
It had all been a lie; the deception of the Thousand-Faced Creature and the illusion vanished the moment the sphere was devoured. The creature couldn't survive without it, and so, it died. This caused the Sad Day that was supposed to start to not even start at all.
…
Back in the center of the park, chaos erupted.
Tiger Mask faced off against a figure cloaked in mist, Mist Demon, as the Tiger Mask called him aloud.
Both of them seemed to arrive at the amusement park with a clear goal, mainly Mist Demon. Tiger Mask had come to protect Uriel, referred to as "the young lady" by his faction. The Mist Demon's motives, however, remained a mystery.
The entire park was split into two regions, with one side swallowed in thick, curling mist and the other consumed by flickering, orange-red flames.
The ground was being burned under the heat of the flames, and the mist was resisting the flames and covering the sky and half the ground.
A voice rang out across the battlefield, harsh and grating, "It's been a long time since we met again, hasn't it, Calix?"
Calix, the man in the tiger mask, stepped forward with disgust, curling his lip. "I don't know why you're here stirring up chaos, but seriously, you need some help. Your voice is so goddamn awful it's making me nauseous. Maybe that's why your wife ended her life."
"Shut up, Calix. She died because you tortured her to know information about me, and today is the day I am going to kill you and get my revenge for her. With the rank 4 stage I reached with being on the same rank as you, I can finally defeat you and get my revenge." The voice sounded on the battlefield.
As the voice was over, the mist in the air began to condense into swords, spears, bows, etc, all of them in gray mist; the whole sky was filled with these mist weapons.
All of them are as huge as 10-story-tall buildings, and there are more than 1000 weapons, all of the same shape and size.
"Bitch, your mist doesn't work on fire. Didn't you study basic science? Hah, and here I thought you were smarter than that." Calix sneered, his entire body erupting in vibrant orange-red flames.
The flames were scorching the earth as they started to dance across the ground, clinging to the park's surface like a living tide. The flames could not reach the sky, though. Above, the mist still reigned. Mist, a sub-affinity of air and water mix, possessed fluid properties by mimicking the nature of vapor and airflow. It made the sky its stronghold, but every element has a counter. And for mist, which is one of the water elements, fire was its nemesis.
The sky rippled as the weapons, which were formed like swords, spears, and colossal bows crafted from dense, condensed fog, each towering over ten stories high. The arsenal hovered, darkening the sky like a coming apocalypse. They descended down to the ground in two blinks of an eye.
The weapons slammed toward the earth as the fire clashed with mist in a hissing explosion, causing ripples of steam to burst outward. The flames roared in defiance, evaporating the ethereal weapons one by one. But some denser and heavier pierced through the fire.
They struck the earth with terrifying force, splintering it open. Fissures raced through the park, stretching like hungry mouths toward the nearby city.
Calix stomped his right foot, causing tendrils of fire to unfurl from beneath his boots, crawling into the cracks like serpents seeking prey. Each rift hissed as flames sealed it shut, stitching the ground with blazing thread.
The earthquake calmed and stabilized, but the remaining mist weapons hit the ground violently as they, too, evaporated, their presence erased by Calix's flames at the end.
Mist is composed not only of the air element but also of water. Mist consists of minuscule water droplets called liquid-phase molecules formed when water vapor condenses in cooler air. Suspended in the atmosphere, this mist is a heterogeneous mixture of air and condensed water.
In simpler terms, it's both air and water combined into a visible, drifting form. Air contains gases like nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor, and mist is what happens when vapor condenses into droplets and lingers in the air.
That's why the Mist Demon's previous attack worked; those tiny water droplets acted as carriers, letting the mist penetrate flames. But fire, especially Calix's, burns hotter than what mist can handle. It's like tossing a few drops on a bonfire; it won't change anything.
Unless, of course, those drops become a flood.
The Mist Demon compressed the atmosphere's mist, thickening it into dense mist until the very moonlight was swallowed. The mist curled and wove itself into a spherical mass so dense that even moonlight vanished behind it.
Within that massive orb, water began to accumulate, held in place by a cocoon of swirling vapor. Slowly, the mist orb compressed further, pressure condensing the water within like an imploding tide.
From mountain-sized to car-sized to palm-sized, the ball shrank.
In the span of seconds, it became a marble, an impossibly dense globe filled with over 100 million tons of liquid, compressed beyond logic.
And the whole country has lost atmosphere, and without atmosphere, breathing is impossible, and so all the humans and living beings are going to die in a few seconds or even right now.
"Here, take this, Calix, you're dead now." Mist Demon bellowed as the marble descended, dragging the sky with it.
'That's more than enough water to drown an entire city with this. Even if you stop the flood, you can't stop civilians from dying from breathing... Now let's see, Calix, will you open your hidden trump card to keep civilians alive or let them die?'
The sky twisted unnaturally as the gravity around the descending sphere began to distort space itself.
Calix, standing firm on the scorched earth, clenched his jaw as a sharp spike of pain shot through his skull. His mind was racing; he knew about the Mist Demon, a notorious assassin with a trail of destruction behind him. The research files were clear: he had two primary weaknesses. First, his wife, a sore and delicate wound of his past, and second, his temper. That same temper could turn him into a berserker, forcing him to throw out all his trump cards in a fit of rage. It made him more powerful, yes, but recklessly so.
"Damn it all, I can't let a single civilian die," Calix muttered, his eyes narrowing. He slammed his foot down.
He knew that the move the Mist demon used would cause all normal humans to die, but there was a way to save everything.
[Solar Apex-Crimson Huntground]
The space around him ruptured, folding and peeling away to reveal a domain forged in crimson and orange flames. The sky above burned gold and crimson like a never-ending dusk streaked with molten rivers of light that bled across the heavens. No clouds hovered, only glowing embers drifting slowly downward like dying fireflies.
The ground was cracked basalt, blackened and jagged, glowing from within with pulses of magma that throbbed brighter with every step Calix took. The terrain exhaled unbearable heat, warping the air in shimmering waves and pressing on intruders like a second gravity.
Obsidian trees sprouted from the landscape, gnarled and leafed with flame-colored foliage that hissed and crackled like burning parchment. Each time the wind blew, sparks trailed from their branches, hissing as they landed.
Calix's black eyes became golden like molten lava as the sphere, a marble of annihilation, plummeted into the molten earth as an infernal blossom erupted outward, but the immense thermal field Calix projected wrapped around the blast like a living shield. The pressure was contained and was diminishing at a fast rate, but it's still a cataclysm. A tectonic upheaval that would've erased a whole country from existence.
Flame and steam intertwined as the superheated atmosphere absorbed the worst of the detonation.
...
After several seconds, nothing remained of the once sprawling park. The mist had dissipated completely; the flames were also extinguished.
Calix stood barely conscious, his body mangled. From the left side of his ribs to the right edge of his waist, a deep gash split his torso, as if his flesh had been flayed and seared away. The exposed skin was glistening like wet parchment. Merely brushing against it would make a pain so intense it could knock a man out cold.
His subordinates, clad in reinforced field gear, rushed to his side. They had been scouring the area while Calix bought them time with his battle against the Mist Demon.
"Sir! We've located the young lady and the boy she's usually seen with," one of them reported, panting.
Calix's charred eyes flicked toward the speaker, a shadow of relief crossing his face.
"Good," he rasped, voice cracked from heat and effort. "Take them and secure them. Then report the boy to the Association and revive the young lady immediately. I need to go report the situation to the Master."
[End of Chapter 12]