Chapter 68: The battle ended The octopus’s crimson eyes glowed like twin dying suns. The entire sea seemed to tremble as that baleful light intensified. Ethan felt a suffocating premonition. His mind processed it in less than a heartbeat. Damn it. He recognized the aura instantly—an amplification skill. But this wasn’t an ordinary boost. He could feel the scale of the surge, how reality itself seemed to warp around those burning pupils. Five times amplification, minimum. Two spears of light erupted from the octopus’s gaze. Red laser beams so bright the sky turned white where they passed. Even before the beams fully formed, Ethan’s instincts were screaming at him. His mind calculated faster than any machine ever built. He could feel every atom of that attack, could predict every trajectory and outcome. If those beams touched him, there would be nothing left to regenerate. Not a molecule. Even the Supercity miles behind him would vanish in a single flash if he tried to dodge sideways. His brain processed solutions in nanoseconds. The energy needed a target. A sacrifice. All thousand of his clones vanished from the periphery of the battlefield and appeared in the direct path of the beams. They stood shoulder to shoulder, clad in golden armor, each one reinforced with every scrap of his mental energy. For a flickering instant, they looked like an unbreakable wall. Then the beams struck them. The impact didn’t even sound like an explosion—it was too sudden, too absolute. It was as if the universe itself had decided to delete that patch of reality. A sphere of annihilation swallowed the clones. Their bodies—each as powerful as an Emperor—shattered into motes of light and vanished. The shockwave tore across the battlefield, flattening dunes of sand, vaporizing monster corpses, and scarring the earth into black glass. But they bought him one crucial instant. The energy of the beams was reduced, diffused. Ethan exhaled a single, measured breath. Then he raised his force weapon sword, and every fiber of his being roared into motion. He poured the force weapon’s potential through his arms, the 360x amplification colliding against the weakened beam in a titanic eruption of force. A dome of golden energy bloomed around him as sword and laser met. The beam surged forward anyway. Its power was monstrous—more than 400 trillion tonnes of destructive force. His counterattack slowed it, but did not stop it. It reached him. The last few billion tonnes of energy struck Ethan’s armor and ripped it away in a single incandescent burst. His skin blackened and cracked, but before he could even feel the pain, his regeneration had already begun. Flesh burned to ash and regrew in the same heartbeat. Destruction and rebirth in perfect balance. Even so, the sheer impact sent him tumbling backwards, half-buried in molten sand. For a moment, the world blurred. Then the beam finally dissipated, and silence returned. Ethan’s chest heaved once. Damn it. One shot—and he’d been reduced to this state. If he hadn’t sacrificed every clone, if his reaction had been a fraction slower, he would be gone. He tried to summon more avatars and felt a void in his core. The force needed to sustain them had been burned away. He would have to refill it with his breathing technique before he could manifest even a single clone again. Slowly, he rose out of the scorched crater, sparks dancing across his skin as his regeneration finished repairing the last wounds. "How can a monster use an amplification skill?" he muttered. His eyes narrowed. "What secret are you hiding?" The octopus’s gaze tracked him with chilling intelligence. For all its brute power, it looked unhurt, unshaken, as though Ethan’s attack had been nothing but a child’s tantrum. He couldn’t let it charge that beam again. If he stayed in this position, the next shot would either vaporize him or erase the city behind him. He moved. In a blink, he teleported kilometers of battlefield, positioning himself so that any further attack would fire harmlessly into the empty desert. But the danger hadn’t ended. From the waters behind the octopus rose three more leviathans. A shark the size of a fortress. A blue whale larger than a stadium. A serpent whose coils stretched across kilometers of churning sea. Ethan could feel it instantly—each had at least a trillion base strength. And worse, each radiated that same unsettling sense of purpose. Skills. Tactics. Intelligence beyond monsters. Though monsters gain intelligence and ability to talk at king level,but that’s only that. Not like them,using skill. He clenched his jaw and sent a message through his mental energy to Dragon, "those three are yours. I’ll handle the Emperor." There was no hesitation. A golden streak ripped across the sky. Dragon flew at a speed that made the air itself thunder. All of humanity watched the feed in breathless silence. There was nothing else they could do. No more warriors to send. No reserves to call up. Their fate rested in the hands of two men. When Dragon stopped above the sea, he let out a long exhale. He opened his eyes, and a golden radiance flared from his pupils. He raised his hand, and an invisible authority descended over the battlefield. The ocean churned and drew back as though bowing to him. The Emperor’s Aura. An ancient, regal pressure rolled outward. A golden crown formed above his brow, glinting in the light. For a moment, he looked less like a man and more like a figure carved into legend. The same aura that had stopped a beast tide twenty years ago. Somewhere in a shelter, a little girl whispered to her mother, "He looks like a king." But even now, something felt different. The octopus’s subordinates radiated a killing intent that was orders of magnitude stronger than anything Dragon had faced in that first battle. The blue whale alone felt like an entire army packed into a single body. Had the ocean Emperor always been this strong? Had it hidden its true power all this time? No one had the answer. Dragon didn’t wait to find out. He raised his hand—and the sea exploded. He struck first, the sword light that tore across the water and crashed into the serpent’s skull. At the same time, the shark launched itself upward, jaws wide, aiming to swallow him whole. On the other side, Ethan turned his focus fully on the octopus. The Emperor’s eyes glowed again—this time not a beam, but a flare of malevolent light. Dozens of tentacles lashed out, each moving faster than sound, trying to crush him from every angle at once. He didn’t hesitate. He blurred sideways, evading the first impact by millimeters. He met the next tentacle with a slash of his sword, pouring all 320 trillion tonnes of his force into the strike. The blade landed. But then it stopped. And simply...stopped. Ethan’s pupils contracted. The tentacle absorbed the impact like it was nothing. The skin didn’t so much as bruise. The entire colossal body shimmered, as though a barrier existed between reality and the flesh beneath. Another skill. A defensive one. But he felt something in the moment of contact. A vibration. A tremor that passed through the barrier into the meat underneath. It’s not absolute. He pulled back, flipping through the air to dodge another swipe. If I can keep hitting the same spot—if I can overload the absorption— He would need time. Time he didn’t have. Dragon and the leviathans were locked in a titanic clash of force. Golden beams rained from the sky as Dragon unleashed every technique he possessed. The serpent answered with blasts of condensed water pressure that punched holes into the ocean itself. The shark’s fins split the air with sonic booms. The blue whale simply barreled forward, battering the sea into tsunamis that pounded the coastline. Each impact sent shockwaves rolling across the battlefield. Dragon’s Emperor Aura clashed against the serpent’s force in a dazzling spectacle that left the sky split by gold and blue. He looked like a war god—regal and unbending. But every time he struck, another tentacle or maw came for him. The whale’s bulk slammed him into the waves. The serpent’s teeth tore through his armor, splattering the ocean with blood. He rose again, defiant. His aura blazing. But even from afar, Ethan could see it—Dragon was bleeding heavily. His breathing was ragged. Ethan’s own breathing technique was running at maximum. His core was slowly filling, precious trickles of force gathering with each measured inhale. He couldn’t help Dragon yet. His own regenration was taking those force.All he could do was keep the Emperor occupied. The octopus came again. Tentacles slammed down like mountains falling. Ethan wove between them, striking over and over. The barrier drank each blow, but the vibrations kept building. He could feel the shield weakening, molecule by molecule. He didn’t feel fatigue. His stamina was limitless. His regeneration repaired every bruise, every burn, every broken bone. One hour passed. Then another. Dragon was still fighting. The serpent lay dead, its skull split open by a final, desperate strike. The shark floated lifeless in the bloodied waves. But the blue whale remained, crashing into Dragon again and again. Dragon’s golden crown flickered. His aura sputtered. But he raised his hand one last time, gathering all the force left in his battered body. With a roar that shook the heavens, he drove his sword into the whale’s heart. A shockwave spread across the ocean. The whale spasmed once—and collapsed. Dragon fell to his knees on the corpse, gasping, every cell screaming. But he was alive. He had done his part. Ethan looked back at the octopus. Its entire body was heaving now. The once-impenetrable barrier glimmered in and out of existence, flickering like a dying flame. The eyes glowed again, but no more beams came. No more power to draw on. It was fighting desperately. And it knew—sooner or later, that sword would reach its flesh. He met its gaze. And for the first time, he saw something other than arrogance in those massive red eyes. He saw unwillingness. Regret. The octopus already used his eye beams ten times,it’s core was also empty now. The defensive barrier just barely activated. It knew,it couldn’t win against this man. A memory flushed in his mind. Fifty years ago, it had been an ordinary creature. A slightly larger octopus, nothing more. Then, in the darkness, a voice had spoken inside its mind. An order. Grow. Conquer. Destroy humanity in fifty years. In that instant, it had gained intelligence. Power surged through its flesh, mutating it beyond recognition. It grew and grew, unstoppable, until it became a peak-level Emperor with unimaginable power. The voice promised it everything—dominion over the oceans, supremacy over the planet. But the condition was simple: If humanity survived, it would die. For decades, it had waited. Conquered the seas. Subdued every rival. And when humanity’s resistance grew too strong, it revealed itself—keeping them in check, making sure no final victory came before the appointed time. Twenty years ago, it fought Dragon and spared him. Because the command was not yet complete,he couldn’t kill that time. Today,after fifty years, he stsrted this decisive battle. He was sure he could squash those weak ant in a day. Then everything would be his alone. But today, everything unraveled. Because of one man. Ethan’s sword rose, gleaming with the last of his gathered force. The octopus stared up at it, and for a moment, in those vast, ancient eyes, there was a plea,desire to live. Then Ethan brought the blade down. The barrier shattered. Steel met flesh. The ocean Emperor split cleanly in two, from crown to tentacle. Its consciousness dissolved into nothing. Silence returned. Dragon lifted his head, barely able to stand, but he saw the body fall. He closed his eyes, exhausted beyond words. The battle was over. And the humanity—against all reason—was still alive. But then, suddenly they heard a voice, not them, everyone in the planet heard the voice of someone in their head.It was like a divine voice from the outer cosmos. A royal decree.