My Taming System Makes Me Overpowered

The High Sanctuary had ceased to be a place of worship or law. It was an arena of pure physical and conceptual ruin.

The grand marble columns, carved by ancient craftsmen to endure the weight of the deep ocean, were reduced to jagged, splintered stumps. Water didn’t flow through the hall; it churned in violent, contradictory pockets. In one step, a soldier would be caught in a hyper-compressed kinetic current that could strip skin from bone; in the next, they would plunge into a dead, absolute vacuum where no sound or magic could exist.

At the center of this maelstrom, Nerissa and zephros were no longer speaking.

They traded blows with a terrifying, rhythmic lethality. Nerissa’s tri-pronged trident smashed against zephros’s leviathan-bone blades in a blinding sequence of strikes. Every time Nerissa thrust forward, she drove a localized pressure wave through her weapon—forcing her enraged, kinetic tides to forcibly shatter zephros’s dampening field.

CLANG! BANG! CLANG!

Sparks of blue hydro-kinetic force and white abyssal energy detonated at every point of impact, carving deep trenches into the stone floor beneath their fins.

Nerissa was magnificent. Her dark sapphire armor was battered, its pauldrons cracked and dripping blood into the water, but her golden eyes burned with an unyielding, fanatical light. She moved like the ocean itself during a hurricane—relentless, aggressive, and absolute. She drove zephros backward step by step, her trident spinning in lethal, fluid arcs that kept him entirely on the defensive.

”Is this the extent of your revolution, zephros?!” Nerissa roared, her voice vibrating the very water around them. She lunged forward, her trident striking with the force of a collapsing trench, driving zephros against the altar steps. ”You came to break an empire, but you cannot even break my line!”

Zephros parried the heavy strike with both blades crossed, the immense physical weight forcing his knees to buckle slightly against the stone. Blood trickled from his gills, his abyssal markings flickering violently as he absorbed the kinetic shockwaves of her furious tide.

Up on the darkened balcony, Lyrielle let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. ”She’s pushing him back!... she’s actually winning!”

Vince didn’t answer. He stood at the edge of the stone railing, his arms crossed, his eyes narrowed in absolute, surgical focus. He wasn’t watching the glowing light of the trident, nor was he looking at the blood on zephros’s blades.

He was watching their footwork. He was calculating the recovery windows.

”She’s over-extending,” Vince grunted, his deep voice cutting through Lyrielle’s excitement. ”She thinks she’s driving him back. She isn’t. He is letting her push him toward the altar.”

Vetra’s amber eyes snapped toward the center of the hall, her sharp instincts immediately catching what Vince had seen. ”The kid...”

Down below, hidden behind the high marble altar directly behind zephros, the terrified young heir of House Ariel cowered in the shadows. Nerissa, fueled by her desperate need to end the threat and prove the absolute invincibility of her duty, was putting everything into a single, decisive finishing strike—unwittingly stepping away from the line of defense to press her advantage.

”She built her whole life on being the shield,” Vince murmured, his voice cold and devoid of pity. ”And her own pride is about to open the door.”

In the hall below, Nerissa gathered every ounce of energy left in her biological frame. The water around her body didn’t just move—it boiled into a roaring, golden-blue vortex. Her cheek-fins flared crimson as she channeled her ultimate technique, aiming to obliterate Kaelen where he stood against the altar steps.

[Tidal Authority: Maelstrom]

”Die, rogue!” Nerissa screamed, thrusting her trident forward with the full, catastrophic weight of an enraged ocean behind it.

The roaring vortex surged toward zephros. It was a strike that could have flattened a fortress gate.

Zephros looked up. In his cold, slit eyes, there was no fear. There was only a dark, terrifying clarity.

He didn’t try to block it. He didn’t try to meet her force with his own.

Instead, the very split-second before the vortex hit him, zephros disengaged his feet from the stone. He allowed the outer edge of her kinetic wave to catch his shoulder, intentionally letting the explosive force blast him backward like a launched stone.

He used her own momentum to bypass her entirely.

THRU-DAT!

Nerissa’s trident struck the empty altar steps, detonating the stone in a blinding explosion of kinetic shockwaves and shattered marble. But as the dust cleared, her golden eyes widened in utter, paralyzing horror.

Zephros was no longer in front of her.

He had tumbled over the high altar, through the doors, landing directly in front of the trembling child of House Ariel.

Nerissa’s body froze. Her recovery window—the micro-fractional second required to pull her heavy trident out of the deep stone and turn her tail—was half a beat too slow.

”NO!” Nerissa shrieked, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony tearing from her throat.

Zephros didn’t hesitate. He didn’t utter a speech, nor did he look back at the general. With a cold, mathematical executioner’s grace, he raised his right leviathan-bone blade and drove it down with all his remaining strength.

SCHLUCK.

The white bone blade pierced the young heir’s chest directly through the glowing blue anchor crest.

A sound like a thousand sheets of thick glass shattering simultaneously echoed not just through the sanctuary, but through the mind of every living creature in Nethros. A blinding, pale blue light erupted from the child’s chest, expanding outward in a dying, pathetic pulse before extinguishing into absolute darkness.

The eighth anchor was dead.

The bloodline chain was broken.

Nerissa stood paralyzed at the base of the shattered altar, her trident slipping from her numb fingers and clattering uselessly onto the bloody marble floor. Her golden eyes were wide, fixed on the lifeless body of the last noble, her entire world, her duty, her pride, and her kingdom collapsing into irrecoverable ash in a single, silent second.

Up on the balcony, Vince watched the pale blue light fade from the hall. He didn’t move. He didn’t flinch.

Down in the pit, the floor beneath them began to groan.