Chapter 14. Hour of Oblivion

The whirlwind that surrounded Conrad began to dissipate in space, forming a kind of dome, inside of which the wind raged. The warrior floated in the air, and the wounds on his body gradually healed. His eyes were empty, as if they belonged to a dead man.

- Aaah!

The First screamed in pain. The wind tore her body to shreds, but regeneration prevented the monster from dying. She tried to seal the barrier to protect herself, but the air cuts easily cut through it. The girl began to choke, as if the air was deliberately avoiding penetration into her lungs.

At this time, Zero's body was enveloped in dense white energy, creating a semblance of an aura, from which, periodically, lightning strikes burst out into the surroundings.

- Great, a start has been made.

Zero couldn't contain his delight.

He rushed at Conrad, creating a spear of lightning in his hand. But the blow was left behind by a barrier of wind that protected the warrior. Then the monster tried to put more force into the blow, which is why his spear began to glow more intensely and threw energy strikes into space.

But the warrior, without much difficulty, knocked the weapon out of the enemy's hands with a stream of wind and, grabbing him by the face, threw him back to the ground. Immediately after this, Conrad surrounded himself with spheres of air, which began to emit air slashes of greater density.

Rising after the blow, Zero again created a spear of lightning and easily repelled all the attacks flying at him.

While Conrad was occupied with his main enemy, a strong pressure began to act on him, which sought to bring him down to the ground. It was a futile attempt by the First to carry out a counterattack, but the warrior did not pay any attention to it.

- Kha!

She coughed up blood.

At that moment, the First realized that she could not take a breath not because the air behaved unusually, but because all this time it had been destroying her lungs from the inside. Due to the ever-increasing number of wounds on its body, the monster's regeneration could not cope with such damage.

The First began to lose consciousness, falling to her knees, she used her strength to push herself off the ground, but when she flew up to the edge of the barrier, she was thrown back.

Streams of wind energy trapped the monsters in a huge barrier, where the power of the wind element was increased many times over. The First's consciousness faded, her wounds stopped regenerating. But her body did not disintegrate into particles, like other Numbered Ones, when they died; it remained lying in the space limited by Conrad's barrier, becoming covered with new wounds.

Having repelled all of Conrad's attacks, Zero created floating spears of lightning around himself, the energy in which was even stronger than in all previous ones, and launched them at Conrad. They were able to break through the warrior's protective barrier, but he disappeared right after that, appearing in front of Zero.

-Are you imitating me?

The monster grinned.

Conrad and Zero engaged in close combat. The warrior attacked with his bare hands, his blows creating powerful windy currents, accompanied by energy cuts.

The monster dodged all the blows without any problems, and the energy cuts flying at him were destroyed by flashes of lightning that burst out of his aura. Finding the right moment, Zero grabbed the warrior's hand and tried to perform a low blow to the jaw, weakening the enemy's defense.

A powerful bolt of lightning erupted from Zero's fist, but Conrad managed to dodge it. He freed his hand and created a kind of two-handed sword from the wind streams, trying to cut the monster into two parts.

Zero stepped back and again created spears of lightning in space that rushed towards the warrior. Their speed increased, Conrad no longer had time to dodge them, so he had to fight them off with the help of the created sword.

The monster appeared to the left of the warrior and hit him with such force that the enemy flew into the vortex barrier separating the space created by Conrad from the outside world. The warrior coughed up blood, he could no longer keep up with the enemy's speed.

Concentrating the energy of the wind around himself, Conrad began to envelop his body with increasingly dense streams of wind, creating an aura that was similar to the one that surrounded the monster's body.

- Right! Feel the very essence of energy!

Zero appeared in front of the man and punched him in the stomach. A powerful flash of lightning broke through the spherical barrier and burst out along with Conrad's body. They left the space in which the wind element reigned over the rest.

The monster calmly walked out through the gap that appeared, and then the barrier dissolved in space, turning into a light breeze. Zero paused, watching as Conrad's body slowly regenerated after being struck by lightning.

- Don't limit yourself to just the basic element!

Zero's voice trembled in anticipation.

The monster was eager to see how far his opponent could advance in understanding his own abilities. But his head was seized by a sharp pain. He grabbed it with both hands. Hopelessness appeared on Zero's face.

- H-how? It's not time yet! Too early!

He tore his hair out and tears flowed from his eyes.

- I beg you, not again, I can't stand it anymore!

The stars in his eyes gathered together, outlining the silhouette of the clock hands, which began to rotate in the opposite direction than usual.

Conrad finished forming his aura and his body recovered. He noticed that his opponent was acting strangely and decided to take advantage of the moment, but when his fist almost reached the monster's face, he felt something strange, as if time itself had stopped.

Zero rolled his eyes upward, black blood began to flow from them. He resisted as best he could, trying to delay something that should have already happened. The monster remained standing in place, as if extremely focused on something, its body only trembling weakly.

At that moment, Conrad's body began to tremble. It was the fear that his opponent would escape. After everything that had happened, he couldn't afford to let the monster go alive. Stopped by time itself, the warrior realized that wind energy was useless, so he began to look for a way out.

He remembered how recently, when in a battle with Zero he accelerated the wind to an unimaginable speed, the friction between the air currents formed energy discharges similar to those with which the monster fought.

Conrad decided to repeat this trick again. But the energy in space did not obey him, so he changed his internal energy. His body began to disintegrate into particles, but this did not stop the warrior.

He accelerated the flow of wind energy within his body until he was finally surrounded by an aura similar to the one that protected Zero, but blue in color. When this happened, space itself seemed to crack, allowing the warrior to move again.

Conrad's body continued to disintegrate, regeneration unable to keep up with the rate of internal destruction.

But his blow reached the monster's face. A powerful burst of energy erupted from the fist. One of Zero's eyes cracked like glass.

Everything has disappeared.

Chapter end