Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 1326 Final Battle - 13

"You must find a way to counter this strike," the clone urged, his tone growing faint. "Failure means the death of everyone."

A thin smile touched the clone's lips, a flash of relief crossing his features as his physical form began to break apart into shards of shadow and light.

"My part is finished."

With those final words, he dissolved entirely.

The flow of time surged forward once more.

The frozen moment shattered.

Warfare erupted again.

Max remained motionless for a heartbeat, the torrent of potential futures forced into his consciousness still ringing painfully in his mind. Then, his focus snapped back to Mark as the world resumed its relentless pace. The world-ending technique was already in motion, its sheer weight crushing the fabric of reality. Max sensed its approach not as a mere projectile, but as an inescapable fate.

"I have to put an end to this," Max whispered, his grip tightening on his hilt until his knuckles turned pale.

The truth was now clear to him. A standard strike would fail. No concept governed by the laws of this world could withstand a force designed to delete existence itself. To oppose an assault of this scale, he needed something that defied erasure—something that transcended cause, effect, and time. He needed a strike forged from the heart of a Cosmic Path.

However, a massive obstacle remained.

Max possessed no Cosmic Path.

He had not even begun to walk one.

"Damn it… use your head," Max snarled at himself, his pulse thumping like a drum in his ears. "What constitutes the core of a Cosmic Path?"

A direction.

That was the bedrock of everything beyond mere concepts. Within the Divine Realm, concepts were just instruments. A Cosmic Path represented the driving will behind them—the direction that permitted laws to grow infinitely without collapsing into paradox. Max had never forged one himself; he had only analyzed them through the theoretical lens of his master's wisdom.

The attack loomed closer.

Reality itself began to shudder.

"Toward what direction do I guide my Severing Sword?" Max's thoughts raced. "Space? No. Space is too relative. If I only sever space, then time, causality, and existence will remain out of my reach."

His mind cycled through every potentiality at a frantic pace.

"Time?" he dismissed the thought instantly. "Time is even more limiting. A blade tethered to time will fail against anything that exists outside of it."

The elements were even worse options. Fire, lightning, frost, or shadow—every element was just a manifestation of reality rather than its foundation. Any path built upon them would be trapped by their inherent boundaries.

"I cannot advance the Severing Sword through any element," Max realized with grim certainty. "That would only imprison it. It would result in specialization rather than transcendence."

The power bearing down on him was now immediate. It weighed on his senses like a final judgment, a terminal sentence written into the universe.

"What is the true essence of the Severing Sword?" Max demanded of himself, forcing back the rising dread. "It doesn't just cut matter. It doesn't just cut energy. It doesn't even just cut laws."

His eyes widened as the realization hit.

"It cuts relationships."

The Severing Sword did not function by destroying objects; it severed the ties between them. It separated cause from effect, existence from meaning, and law from authority.

"That’s it," Max exhaled.

A Cosmic Path could not be constructed on the substance of things. It had to be built on the very things that allowed existence to relate to itself.

"I won't guide my blade through space, time, or the elements," Max determined as clarity finally cut through his confusion. "I will guide it through the concept of separation itself."

His hold on the sword became steady.

"A path that severs without bias. A path that ignores whatever stands in its way. A path that refuses to see laws, causality, or existence as barriers."

The attack was only seconds from completion.

Max lifted his sword with a slow, deliberate motion, his breath growing calm.

"I will not follow an elemental path," he spoke softly. "I will walk the path of absolute severance."

In that precise moment, a shift occurred within Max.

It wasn't a change in power.

It was his emotions.

Max didn't know if he would eventually regret this path, nor did he have the time to weigh the costs beyond the next few heartbeats.

The strike was descending; reality was already being unmade. Any hesitation would result in total annihilation. If a path was to be walked, it had to be now.

Throughout his life, Max had felt emotions in their most violent extremes. He had known joy that was blinding and sorrow that dragged him into a bottomless pit. He had felt rage like a storm devouring the heavens and despair that left him hollow. Love had granted him power, and hatred had honed his resolve.

He had never truly appreciated these feelings, particularly after receiving an artificial soul that intensified every sensation a thousand times over. Yet, he could no longer ignore the truth. These emotions had defined him more than any Cultivation technique, any legacy, or any law he had mastered.

His anger was never a mere annoyance; it was a tempest that burned away logic. His happiness was never mild; it was an explosive force. His grief did not sit quietly; it crushed him until every breath was a struggle.

For years, Max had viewed this as a defect—a burden to be managed. Now, facing total destruction, he saw something he had previously overlooked.

Those emotions were not his flaws.

They were his only true constants.

If he anchored his Severing Sword to space, it would be limited by distance. If he chose time, it would be bound by sequence. If he chose the elements, it would be restricted by form.

But emotions were different. They resided in all sentient things. They existed beyond laws, beyond dimensions, and even beyond logic. They were not governed by causality; they were the creators of causality.

A blade forged from emotion would be indifferent to its target.

It would cut through gods and mortals with equal ease.

Max drew a deep breath.

For the first time in an age, he stopped resisting his feelings. Instead, he welcomed them. Every memory flooded back—the thrill of power, the agony of loss, the fire of betrayal, the coldness of isolation, the dread of defeat, and the oath to protect.

Every feeling he had ever known since his awakening surged into his heart and artificial soul, before streaming outward into his weapon.

The sword began to vibrate.

Its hue transformed, discarding silver, black, and gold. It became a deep, dark gray—neither light nor dark, neither vibrant nor dead. The space surrounding the blade warped in silence; it did not tear, but simply became irrelevant, as if the sword no longer recognized the existence of space itself.

"The direction for my Cosmic Path of the Severing Sword," Max whispered, his voice unwavering against the approaching end, "is the Emotion Severing Sword."

Then, he released everything.

In that split second, Max severed every emotion within his being.

The stress of stopping Mark’s strike vanished. The brief spark of insight died out. The grief over his clone’s end faded into nothingness. There was no fury. No dread. No optimism. No hopelessness. There was only absolute clarity.

His blade became a void.

And because it was empty, it possessed the power to sever all things.

Max moved forward and struck.

There was no blinding light, no thunderous boom, and no scream.

The slash drifted through Mark’s world-erasing technique as if it were mere smoke. It did not clash or struggle. It simply severed the link between cause and effect, cutting the reason for the attack's existence before it could fulfill its purpose. The erasure disintegrated in silence, vanishing into nothing as if it had never been cast.

The strike continued its trajectory.

It reached Mark.

And once again, Mark’s body was cleaved in two.

He was not smashed or broken. He was severed.

"What?" Mark bellowed, his voice piercing the ruined sky as shock finally replaced his insanity. He stared down at his bisected form—at the clean, ruthless cut that had divided not just his flesh, but the very core of his being. "How can this be happening?" he screamed, a mixture of panic and fury taking hold as he faced the unthinkable.

This time, his healing factors did not kick in immediately.

The two halves of his frame shook as divine radiance flickered feebly between them. Flesh and essence began to crawl toward each other at a snail's pace, so slowly that Mark could feel every second of the agonizing process. Minutes ticked by without progress. He realized with a surge of terror that full recovery would take hours, and even that was no longer a certainty.

Max’s blade had done more than wound his body.

It had severed the law of causality itself.

The unseen thread connecting Mark to the crown—the link that allowed infinite divine authority to pour into him—had been sliced through.

Cause was no longer tied to effect.

The crown no longer acknowledged Mark as its master. His immortality, once an absolute truth, was now nothing more than a fading echo.

"No," Mark gasped, his bravado crumbling. "This isn't possible..."

Before he could pull his fractured will together, a new figure emerged.

Lucien walked forward with an air of calm, positioning himself between the two halves of Mark’s body. The surrounding chaos seemed unable to touch him. His gaming goggles reflected streams of complex data, and he held a simple controller loosely, as if he were merely performing a mundane task.

He gazed at Mark with total indifference.

Then, he gave the command.

"Permanent erase."

The words were quiet, almost casual.

Reality obeyed at once.

Mark’s divided form began to dissolve. He didn't burn or break; he simply scattered into a billion fragments of existence that unraveled into the void. The divine light turned to dust. The infernal power drifted away. The last threads of causality holding him together snapped, leaving him with no anchor, no point of return, and no future where he could regenerate.

"Impossible!" Mark shrieked as he came apart, his voice thick with pure horror. "How? I am immortal! I cannot be slain! I am the god of this world! I cannot die!"

His screams rang out briefly before fading away.

The final remnants of his presence vanished, erased so thoroughly that no soul, essence, or echo remained. There was no explosion, no final defiant roar. There was only a sudden absence.

Silence reclaimed the area.

Where a self-proclaimed god had stood, only the tainted crown remained, hovering lifelessly in the air before Lucien. Its dark crimson light pulsed weakly, as if it no longer knew why it existed now that its bearer was gone.

The immortal crownbearer was no more.

Gone forever.