Chương 386: Chapter 376 - The Boy With a Golden Will

Alonso stared at the lean, wiry young boy who looked no older than 14. He was barefoot, wearing a simple, dirt-smudged wool shirt and a short, frayed tunic, with a small pouch hanging from his belt. Blond hair fell in uneven, tousled strands around his face. In his right hand he held a short, leaf-shaped sword, its edges lined with a faint gold sheen. On his left forearm rested a small buckler. Yet what stood out far more were his eyes.

They shone with a radiant, molten gold, bright enough to catch the air with each faint pulse. And in that glow, Alonso felt nothing—no anger, no curiosity. Just the familiar hollow stillness he had sensed in every Dungeon entity before. A construct wearing the shape of a boy. The prompt flickered before Alonso's sight, and he couldn't stop the slow smile that formed. Jack, the Giant-Killer Power Index: 8400 The hero of the tale himself.

The pressure rolling from him was unlike the Golden Goose's wild, storm-like force. Jack's presence was focused, sharpened, and dense, a refined Will compressed into a boy's frame. Golden motes drifted around him in steady, tidal pulses. Each pulse pushed against the world, as if his Will overflowed the boundaries of his body and leaked into reality, forming a crown of molten light around him.

Alonso felt his heartbeat rise as Will Manifest burned brighter behind him, feeding the pressure tightening across his chest and spine. He moved forward, letting the cosmic silhouette behind him stabilize its stance with his own. The void thickened with every step, stars brightening in the hollows of that astral frame. The radiant gold met the darkness of the void the moment they closed half the distance.

The clash of Wills did not explode outward but pressed inward, bending the air between them into rippling distortion. A deep vibration passed through the sky, rolling across the torn battlements and shaking free flecks of broken stone. Gold and black coiled around each other, twisting like two opposing tides. Alonso kept advancing. His breathing steadied. His pulse settled into a controlled rhythm. His instincts sharpened into a clean edge.

Jack advanced in perfect mirror, each step firm and precise, the air itself seeming to harden beneath his feet. Pressure built between them. The weight of their Wills grew denser with every metre they closed. Wind curled and stretched in unnatural patterns. Clouds thinned and spiralled aside, creating a hollowed corridor of sky that recognised the force being exerted within it. By the time they reached less than a dozen meters from each other, the world appeared split down an invisible line.

On Jack's side, molten gold rose like banners and ripples of light shimmered through the air. On Alonso's side, the void deepened into an ocean of black threaded with turning stars and planets. Alonso's grip tightened around his swords. Jack angled his buckler. The air warped around their shapes as the mounting pressure crested. They blurred. CLANG In the span of a single heartbeat, they collided hundreds of times.

Their figures flickered through the sky in spiralling arcs, vanishing and reappearing as lines of gold and streaks of starlight carved through the open air. Each impact reverberated through the clouds, a storm of kinetic force wrapped in sparks and Will. Alonso felt Jack's rhythm. Every swing of the boy's leaf-shaped blade carried refined precision. Every shift of his buckler was deliberate, cutting angles in ways that forced him to adapt with frightening speed. The boy fought like someone who knew battle well.

He kept pushing, weaving his dual-sword style through space, one blade intercepting the boy's sword while the other targeted the gaps around his elbow or ribs. Sparks of void-black and streaks of radiant gold shot in spirals around them as their Wills collided again and again. Jack's combat awareness was extraordinary. Almost on par with his own. The boy's feints were viciously clever. Half of them were layered with traps that would have caught anyone else.

A misaligned foot that looked like an opening was a lure for a counter. A momentary overextension at the shoulder hid a timed reversal. Even his buckler's micro-tilts were crafted to bait a blade-slip. In terms of pure combat technique—Darius aside—this was the strongest opponent he had ever faced. Leagues above Leonie, or anyone else. And yet that only made the grin on his face widen. He pushed harder. His breath steadied. His instincts expanded. His movements grew cleaner, faster, more ruthless.

His swordsmanship began to shine the way it was meant to—two blades shaping trajectories in perfect counterpoint, one cutting, the other predicting, both powered by a storm of EM vectors and anchored by the towering void-born Will behind him. His body flowed in pivoting arcs, blades carving comet-paths as he intercepted Jack's tempo and slowly eroded it. Gold and black blurred so fast the space itself distorted. Jack shifted his stance—quick, razor-sharp—but he had already read the intention behind it.

Alonso caught the incoming strike with his left blade, twisted, redirected, and slipped inside the boy's guard with the right. A clean line carved down Jack's shoulder. Warm, gold-tinted droplets of blood scattered across the air. He pressed into the advantage, funneling more EM into his limbs as Path of Shards sharpened his strikes. His blades dug for the next openings. He scored another hit across the forearm, another across the hip, then one against the ribs that forced Jack to recoil half a step. He had him.

He could feel it. The pattern had cracked. The rhythm was his. He lunged for the decisive cut— CLING! —and his blade slammed against something solid. A clear, ringing tone vibrated across the sky. A golden barrier flared around Jack, shaped like an egg, translucent but radiant enough to stain the air in molten light. The sudden resistance jolted through his arms, forcing him back half a metre in mid-air. His eyes narrowed. That golden egg barrier.

He could feel the EM framework shaping its form, but the force reinforcing it, what made it so absurdly solid, was Will. Not bad. Jack's expression didn't shift. His golden eyes burned cold, lacking even the faintest trace of humanity, as if the defence he raised was as natural as drawing breath. Alonso steadied himself in the air. That last strike told him one thing. He couldn't break that barrier. But sustaining something like that had to cost Jack. He won't be able to keep it active indefinitely.

The tension in the air suddenly thinned without warning. Something stirred far below. Alonso's pulse spiked as a warning flared through every nerve. He looked down. The giant beanstalk had pierced through the clouds! The entire colossal structure, thousands of metres of vine and leaf, writhed like a waking leviathan beneath the cloud layer. The stalk twisted on itself, coils rippling upward in a spiral, and then surged toward the sky with terrifying speed.

It rose until it reached behind the boy like a monstrous snake, vines tightening together into a spear-thick tendril. Jack's Will had fused with it. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. The beanstalk was now an extension of him. Alonso almost cursed. Wasn't this… a bit too much? Yet the grin on his face did not fade. Tendrils the thickness of tree trunks erupted upward, lashing toward him at supersonic speed.

He shifted aside just as one tore past his ribs with a violent crack that rippled the clouds. Another snapped from behind, then another, and soon the sky was crowded with coordinated strikes, each guided with unnerving precision. Three tendrils locked onto him from different vectors in a tightening pincer, two set to impale while the third curled for his waist. Path of Shards surged and vectors flooded his sight.

The air became lines, curves, trajectories—every motion mapped into a shifting lattice of possibilities. He threaded through them with no room for mistakes. The first slid past his hip. The second brushed his sleeve and seared a shallow cut across his arm. The third he slid under, his blade removing its tip in passing. Each evasion sharpened as more information fed into his system. Each dodge cleaner. Each cut more precise. The tempo rose, and his Will fed directly into the flow. The beanstalk answered in kind.

Dozens of tendrils burst upward, then hundreds, turning the sky into a spiralling forest of green spears. He rose with them, weaving between the streaks of motion. Some he severed cleanly. Some he redirected with angled cuts. Others grazed him, slicing thin lines of red across his ribs and shoulder as they tore past. He gritted his teeth but refused to break rhythm. His world was vectors, distance and timing. All he needed was more data—more movement to map, more attacks to predict.

Above him the boy hovered within his golden shell, left arm slightly extended. Every twitch of the wrist. Every controlled breath. Each microscopic gesture translated into a fresh barrage. The tendrils moved like extensions of a single mind. The tempo increased again. The entire sky twisted into a cage of vine and gold. Alonso dodged one strike, then another, and the third skimmed across his forearm, opening a sharp slice that trailed droplets of blood through the air.

He twisted mid-flight, cutting three tendrils in a tight arc, only for a fourth to rip through the clouds behind him. The shockwave jarred his balance and almost collapsed his stance. He corrected quickly, but he could feel the escalation. A spiral of tendrils surged around him, fast enough that the air whined under their passage. They aimed to crush, pierce, bind—each strike calculated, relentless, hungry for even a single error. He would not make one. He pushed harder. Microcapacitors fired in rapid succession.

Will Manifest surged behind him, galaxies tightening around his frame. His perception expanded. The sky filled with lines—dozens becoming hundreds, hundreds becoming a living web of attack vectors and possibilities. His body blurred into the pattern he read in real time, each shift a response to a future hit rather than the present one. Path of Shard echoes flickered behind him as decoys, snapping the aim of several tendrils that almost caught him.

Yet even with everything— the precision of his movements, the force of his Will, the depth of his predictions— the boy matched him perfectly. Every time he created distance, tendrils sealed it. Every opening he carved collapsed immediately. Every reposition was checked by a counter that matched his timing and intent. Alonso's breathing deepened. Sweat slid down his jaw. Blood streaked behind him in faint crimson trails. The tempo kept rising. The vines moved faster. Jack's golden shell did not show signs of fading.

The air thickened between them, almost humming with the strain of two Wills grinding together. Alonso severed another tendril, only for three more to attack from blind angles. He deflected the first, leaned just enough for the second to pass, but the third clipped his shoulder and sent a tremor through bone. He exhaled hard and forced acceleration back into his limbs. However… it was clear that if this continued… he would lose. He breathed out slowly.

He had wanted to keep his cards hidden, to save them for whatever may come next… but he had no choice. Jack was truly strong. Will Manifest alone wouldn't be enough. Alright then… You have your vines… and I… Dozens of tendrils converged at once, sealing off every path of escape. The air tightened. The vectors collapsed. For anyone else, the fight would be over. Yet Alonso merely leaned forward, only slightly, his stance solid, breath steady—and in the instant the vines struck— Four swords carved through the sky.

They cut cleanly. They severed everything. They opened a path where none had existed. As his blades parted the green storm, he met the boy's golden gaze. Around his swords a blurry haze rippled—two shadows behind the light, the unseen blades made real. Will Manifest: No-Strike Unlike the main state, this one demanded much more. It burned through him. It strained both mind and body. So he had to keep this short. He dove straight back into the storm.

The vines whipped toward him in a frenzy, but they no longer found him outpaced. Four blades moved where two hands couldn't—cutting apart tendrils faster than they formed, carving through the air in sweeping arcs of void-tinged light. The tide shifted in the span of a breath. Every lash was met by a cut. Every feint was answered. Every attempt to cage him was shredded before it took shape. The vines faltered. The rhythm broke. Jack's golden shell began to thin, cracks of dimmed light spidering across its surface.

Alonso pushed harder. His shoulders tensed as Will surged from his core, the cosmic silhouette behind him brightening. Every beat of his pulse sharpened his blades. Every breath narrowed the world into vectors and weak points. As he blurred forward, Jack's barrier shattered in a soft, glass-like ripple of gold. He thrust ahead to finish it. But the moment the shell vanished, a pulse rolled off Jack like a heartbeat made of light.

From the boy's back unfurled two great wings—each feather a spectral blade of gold, the echo of the Golden Goose given form once more. The wings snapped open with blinding radiance, and Jack launched himself upward with impossible acceleration. Golden feathers rained toward Alonso in sheets. He cut them apart, four blades weaving a net of steel and Will, but the air vibrated under their force as more and more materialised. At the same time, the vines below surged upward again, renewed by the boy's ascension.

They struck from every angle—slapping, piercing, folding around him with coordinated malice. The world had turned against him. Still he pushed deeper. He felt the sting of feathers clipping his skin, cutting shallow lines across his ribs and arms. A tendril slapped across his side hard enough to bruise bone. Electricity crackled along his armour as another burst of feathers struck too close. Yet his focus didn't waver. He studied the rhythm behind it all. The boy's timing. The angles of each vine.

The faint delay between feather creation and launch. He saw every trap. Every false opening. Every attempt to funnel him into a kill-zone. And he carved through it. A lunge of the swords brought him close, as three blades sealed every counter and the fourth cut across Jack's shoulder. For an instant the boy's flight dipped as golden blood scattered through the air like molten drops.

Alonso pressed the advantage, Will surging through his limbs as he tore past the wing-feathers and the shifting vines, striking again—a clean, radiant line blooming across Jack's arm. He was winning. But then Jack disengaged with a sharp burst of his wings. His hand dipped to the pouch at his waist and with a single, fluid swing— Six green beans scattered into the wind. Alonso's senses screamed. The world changed.

Six colossal beanstalks erupted at once—monuments of twisting green ripping through the cloud-sea like pillars forcing their way into existence, each thousands of meters tall. They tore upward with thunderous force, coiling toward the sky with impossible speed and joined the first. Seven titanic vines, spiralling like ancient serpents reborn, like a green hydra curving and bending across the heavens. And then— All seven converged.

A forest of living spears twisted into a single massive assault, covering the heavens from horizon to horizon. Tendrils thicker than towers folded in on him from every direction, a closing decree from a god sculpted in green that demanded his death. Jack hovered behind them, golden wings spread, blood dripping, eyes burning without emotion. Retreat was impossible. The world no longer offered escape. Yet Alonso didn't take a step back. He couldn't. He wouldn't. The cosmos behind him convulsed. Stars trembled.

Galaxies rotated. The silhouette of Will Manifest deepened until the void itself seemed to leak into reality, its edges distorting the sunlight as the starlit frame expanded across the sky. His presence dimmed, then sharpened— a blade drawn from nothingness. Everything he was, aligned into a single point. Everything he had forged. Everything he had become. Every star in the void brightened. Every galaxy burned.

Every possibility— every strike he could make— every angle he could take— every vector he could choose— collapsed into certainty. From the void he walked. From the shards he learned. From Will he shaped a cosmos of his own. Let the heavens split. Let the sky remember my name. Let the world open a path where none should be. Come forth— and sever everything that stands before me. Will Manifest: Path of Shards And the void answered. A rain of starlight—countless razor-thin arcs—filled the sky. Each was a sword.

Each was a strike. Each was a projection of a path he could have taken, now made real in one singular moment. The seven beanstalks met the vastness of the void. They lasted less than a heartbeat. The world of green was severed, shredded into drifting ribbons that dissolved into spark-dust. Jack's wings broke next, carved by seven lines of void-light. His frame cracked along those same angles, golden blood flaring, before his body burst into shimmering motes that scattered into the wind. The sky fell silent.

And only one man remained.