Chapter 424: The Pure White Painting!
An army against one person.
Firearms against a sword.
The comparison was admittedly simplistic, but it still reflected the most basic advantages and disadvantages.
At this moment, almost no one believed Luke had the upper hand.
Bullets had struck him. Missiles had struck him.
An ordinary human, even a Blazer, would have been torn apart in an instant.
Unfortunately for Sara, Luke did not belong in the category of "ordinary."
Blue starlight gathered around him and formed a barrier.
Luke calmly walked through the gunfire and black smoke, advancing toward Sara without the slightest urgency.
Prana appeared similar to mana, but the two were fundamentally different.
Even their outward manifestations had one enormous distinction.
Defense!
Mana could form armor capable of resisting modern weapons, including the magically created modern weapons Sara had manifested.
As long as the mana coating a Blazer's body was not exhausted, and they continued supplying more, their mana armor would remain intact.
Conversely, once that mana was depleted, the armor would disappear.
Prana was different.
A Prana barrier only consumed energy at the instant it was created.
Afterward, as long as an attack could not actually break through the barrier, the user suffered no further loss.
The difference could be compared to a continuously powered energy shield and a solid physical shield.
Even an attack that failed to penetrate mana armor would still consume some mana.
But if an attack failed to break through a Prana barrier, it accomplished absolutely nothing.
This characteristic was the main reason Prana possessed defensive power far beyond other energy systems of the same level.
Conventional modern weapons had been phased out in Asterisk precisely because, unlike against mana, they were almost completely useless against Prana.
Although Luke would not be injured, he had to admit that Sara's current combat power was finally enough to qualify her as his opponent.
Across the entire world, excluding Desperados, there were probably very few people capable of forcing Luke to use both mana and Prana simultaneously.
At this point, Luke finally understood why Edelweiss had praised Sara so highly.
Without Prana's exceptional defensive properties, Sara's relentless bombardment might have forced Luke to draw upon the reserve mana stored within Sword Sheath of Tranquility.
Therefore, out of respect for a worthy opponent, Luke decided to stop holding back.
Until now, he had been waiting to see what Sara could show him.
And Sara had not disappointed him.
As Luke released more Prana, endless starlight began to emerge.
Before anyone noticed, faint points of blue light had already spread throughout the entire arena.
The blue stars were difficult to see clearly in daylight.
Had it been night, the spectators might have witnessed the miraculous sight of a galaxy descending upon the earth.
Star Sword Art: Myriad Stars!
Luke casually swung Starfall Sword toward Sara from a distance.
In the next instant, the endless starlight transformed into sword light.
A storm of blades formed from the stars!
Almost simultaneously, every undead skeleton surrounding Sara was cut in half and scattered through the air like scraps of paper.
The technique, combining offense and defense, effortlessly annihilated the entire undead army.
Afterward, Luke raised his head toward the incoming cruise missile.
Starfall Sword instantly returned to its sheath.
Then—
A flash of battoujutsu!
A gigantic wave of sword energy surged into the sky, wrapped in blue starlight.
It became an enormous blade of stellar light and split the cruise missile cleanly in two!
Violent sword intent and raging sword energy swept outward like a hurricane, dispersing the thick black smoke left behind by the bombardment.
The battlefield was revealed to the audience once again.
And now, only one enemy remained before Luke.
Sara herself!
However, Luke had already decided to stop holding back, so his movements did not pause.
Having acknowledged Sara as an opponent worthy of a real battle, Luke gave her no opportunity to recover.
The moment every creation of Purple Caricature was destroyed, the surrounding starlight suddenly began shining with overwhelming brilliance!
If Myriad Stars had been difficult to notice beneath the daylight, the river of Prana now stretching across the arena was visible to everyone.
Then a single star suddenly emerged from that galaxy.
With unstoppable momentum, it crashed toward Sara!
Star Sword Art Ultimate Technique!
Battoujutsu: Star Severance!
Sara could not block this attack.
Both Luke and Sara understood that.
Even the surrounding spectators could see it.
The power descending from the cosmos appeared utterly unstoppable.
In everyone's eyes, Sara's defeat had already been decided!
Yet Sara showed no intention of surrendering.
Above her, a painting she had been working on since the beginning of the match was finally nearing completion.
Vast amounts of mana poured continuously through the Brush of Demiurge and into the artwork.
Clearly, Sara was preparing to reveal her own trump card.
But to the surrounding spectators, her actions looked like nothing more than a final desperate struggle.
Whatever she created—a tank, an aircraft, even a gigantic robot—it could never withstand the power of a falling star.
However…
Boom—!
With an earth-shaking explosion, the star was stopped!
Beneath the overwhelming light, the figure Sara had manifested was difficult to see clearly.
The audience could only make out one thing.
What had stopped the star was a sword.
A platinum-white longsword!
Just as everyone erupted in amazement and cheered at the fierce exchange—
A second sword light caught up from behind!
The pursuing sword strike split the "star" itself in two and continued forward beneath the horrified gazes of the audience.
Straight toward the platinum-white sword!
Clang—!
Boom—!
The clear ring of colliding swords echoed toward the heavens.
But it lasted only an instant before being swallowed by a deafening explosion that shook heaven and earth.
The ground overturned.
The specially reinforced arena did not survive even a single second.
The entire stage shattered apart.
The protective barrier erected before the audience by numerous professional Mage-Knights broke the instant the shockwave struck it.
Nearly every Mage-Knight maintaining the barrier was blasted backward.
Kurono and Nene reacted first.
Without hesitation, both activated their abilities.
Under the combined suppression of a gravitational field and a temporal barrier, they finally stopped the earth-shaking shockwave.
The storm faded.
The dust slowly settled.
Only then did the shaken spectators finally have a chance to look back toward the battlefield.
A pure-white Valkyrie holding a platinum-white sword stood before Luke.
Her blade had stopped Starfall Sword.
No one had any attention left to spare for the destruction around them.
The instant they saw that pure-white figure, every mind in the venue went completely blank.
Because standing there was none other than—
Twin-Wings Edelweiss!
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