Atticus's Odyssey: Reincarnated Into A Playground novel Chapter 1042

But even Xal’zereth knew no answer was coming.

His array of abyssal-black eyes narrowed sharply, and his hand snapped forward in a blur of motion, fingers splayed.

A radiant mana shield burst to life between him and Atticus, shaped by complex geometric layering, reinforced with encoded glyphs, one of the most advanced defensive matrices the Zorvans had ever developed.

They waited for the collision. Yet, it never came.

Another impossibility slammed into Xal’zereth.

His mind lurched as Atticus’s descending blade suddenly took on a subtle blue hue, matching the shield’s mana signature perfectly, and then… phased through it.

No clash. No resistance. No impact.

Xal’zereth’s eyes trembled, as his brain was flooded with contradictory data, trying to calculate something that made no sense.

He had mimicked the shield’s mana signature?

Too late.

Mana suddenly enveloped his form, swallowing him as he teleported last second.

The attack missed, but not without a trace.

The air where he had stood ruptured, a vertical column of violent force ripping downward through the sky.

Xal’zereth reappeared in the distance, floating high above in the air, still, motionless.

But this time, his face wasn’t unreadable.

It wasn’t a subtle twitch or narrowed glance.

It was unreal shock. His eyes were wide, trembling, his breath came in fast, and his posture tense.

His mind spun, calculating, parsing, dissecting, and failing.

Then, softly, almost in disbelief, he said:

"…He copied the mana signature… of the shield?"

The words echoed hollowly in the silence that followed, a whisper of horror.

It was like the world collapsed around him.

It wasn’t a feeling of superiority. He wasn’t disdained by the idea that a mere human had pushed him this way. No.

To Xal’zereth, everything he was witnessing didn’t make sense. He had seen it with his eyes, and yet, it didn’t make sense.

Zorvans were overlords of mana.

They didn’t just wield it, they existed within it, shaped by it, evolved around it. Their entire combat philosophy, their techniques, their very biology were bound to pure mana manipulation.

In a world where mana signatures could be mimicked, they had long ago devised measures to ensure their supremacy could never be subverted.

It was akin to encryption.

Just as sensitive files in a high-level system are locked behind layers of digital protection, so too did the Zorvans encode their mana signatures, layering them with complex, shifting sequences, self-replicating distortions, and quantum-phase scramblers designed to make them impossible to copy or replicate.

But what Atticus had just done…

Was the equivalent of hacking into a government’s most secure facility, bypassing centuries of encryption, and doing it in less than a second.

Suddenly, Atticus turned. His intense purple eyes collided with Xal’zereth’s abyssal black and then…

’He’s coming!’

A warning tore through the minds of everyone watching.

The sky ruptured.

A deafening vacuum exploded into existence, collapsing air inward in a violent spiral as Atticus vanished from his position, appearing right in front of Xal’zereth, his body trailing a vortex of dark crimson energy.

His katana moved.

It flashed, descended, ascended, slashed sideways, twisted in arcs, stabbed forward, and cut back all at once.