The seven Dou Lings stepped forward, closing the circle, their auras locking onto the group to prevent any desperate suicidal attacks.
They were completely helpless. Yoriichi's tactical mind raced at lightspeed, desperately trying to calculate an escape route. 'My blade is fractured. My Dou Qi is barely a puddle. I cannot utilize the any form again without shattering my arms. Is this the limit of a mortal vessel?'
Beside him, Captain Lin's face was pale, but her eyes were darting frantically toward the southern sky.
'When are they coming?' Lin thought internally, her heart hammering against her ribs. 'When the falcons were first attacked by the crescent blades, I crushed the vial. The Academy must have received it. But the distance is vast... I just need to buy a few more minutes. I need to stall!'
Seeing the Dou Lings drawing binding chains, Lin abruptly stepped forward, placing herself directly between the Dou Wang and the siblings.
She brought her hands together, cupping her fists in a stiff, traditional warrior's greeting.
"Senior of the Demon Flame Valley!" Lin shouted, her voice echoing with desperate, forced bravado. "I am a Captain of the Jia Nan Law Enforcement Unit! I know my fate today is sealed. I know I cannot defeat you. But as a law enforcerer, I refuse to be taken like a chained dog!"
The Dou Wang paused, raising an eyebrow at her outburst.
"So, I ask that you grant me a final warrior's wish!" Lin continued, gritting her teeth. "I request a life-and-death duel with you! One on one. If I die, I die with my weapon in hand!"
For a moment, the clearing was dead silent. Then, the Dou Wang let out a sharp, amused laugh.
"A life-and-death duel?" the Dou Wang chuckled, looking at the mid Da Dou Shi as if she were a toddler challenging a dragon. "Girl... why would I waste my breath? You know your fate. You are a captive. Captives do not get to make demands."
"I will die in a fight rather than in misery and helplessness!" Lin roared, her lightning saber crackling with the very last drops of her Dou Qi.
Seeing her terrifying resolve, Vice-Captain Feng silently stepped up beside her, drawing his wind-blade. A second later, Xiao Yu gently let go of Yoriichi, allowing him to lean against a bamboo stalk, and stepped forward to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Enforcers, her pink-red eyes burning with unyielding defiance.
They would not be taken alive to become cauldrons or torture subjects. They would detonate their own Dantians first.
The Dou Wang looked at the three youngsters standing before him, ready to throw their lives away. He muttered softly, "The Jia Nan Academy truly breeds brave, foolish youngsters. A pity."
The other seven Dou Lings were watching the spectacle with cruel amusement, knowing they had total control of the clearing. The Dou Wang could have humored them and dragged the fight out for his own entertainment.
But as an overlord of the Black-Corner Region, he knew that lingering in enemy territory was a fool's errand. Time wasted was risk accumulated.
He shook his head, his amused expression vanishing into absolute coldness.
"No use," the Dou Wang commanded, raising his right hand, his fiery Dou Qi flaring violently. "Break their limbs so they cannot detonate their cores. Take them all alive. Let's go to our base."
The Dou Lings sneered and lunged forward simultaneously. Lin, Feng, and Xiao Yu braced for the agonizing impact, ready to fight to their dying breath.
Hopelessness finally settled over the clearing.
But just as the Dou Lings moved, Yoriichi's ancient, battle-honed instincts violently spiked. His Transparent World vision didn't just see the immediate clearing; it saw the macro-flow of worldly energy.
'Someone is coming,' Yoriichi realized, his eyes widening slightly. 'And their energy... it is an abyss and... familiar also.'
As the Dou Wang violently swung his hand down to initiate the capture, the very fabric of reality within the Sea of Whispering Bamboos seemed to completely halt.
An unknown, incomprehensible pressure descended upon the forest.
It wasn't heavy like the Dou Wang's aura. It was absolute. It was the feeling of space itself solidifying into unbreakable chains.
The Dou Wang's hand froze mid-swing. His eyes widened in absolute, primal horror as he realized he could not move a single muscle. His vocal cords were locked. The fiery Dou Qi raging within his meridians was violently suppressed, forced back into his Dantian as if a god had placed a hand upon his chest.
Around the clearing, the seven charging Dou Lings didn't just freeze; the sheer ambient weight of the newly arrived aura forced them violently to their knees, their faces slamming into the dirt, entirely paralyzed.
Then, a voice echoed through the silent, frozen bamboo sea.
It was a woman's voice. It was soft, casual, and laced with a terrifying, amused edge that made the air itself vibrate with power.
"Well, well. If I am even a single second late, you Valley dogs start kidnapping my students, huh?"
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "The Demon Flame Valley is really getting bolder day by day. Did your Valley Master forget who owns this territory?"
The Dou Wang, trembling violently, managed to shift his locked eyeballs just enough to look upward. All the color drained from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse.
Desperation fueled him. With a terrifying, internal scream, the Dou Wang attempted to forcefully detonate his own essence blood, trying to release the absolute maximum output of his 5-Star Dou Wang aura just to break the spatial lock and run.
Pop.
His 5-Star aura flared for a microscopic fraction of a second before it was effortlessly, casually snuffed out, like a candle caught in a hurricane. He remained entirely locked in place, suspended in his own terror.
Slowly, the others managed to look up.
Yoriichi and Xiao Yu's eyes widened in profound surprise. Captain Lin and Vice-Captain Feng instantly recognized the aura, and a massive, shuddering sigh of absolute relief escaped their lips.
Standing high above the clearing, casually looking down at the paralyzed assassins, was a woman.
She did not have Dou Qi wings. She did not use wind techniques to hover.
She was simply standing perfectly still in the empty air, her feet resting upon the invisible void of space itself as if it were a solid marble floor. The moonlight caught the elegant, intricate silver patterns of her luxurious robes as they fluttered gently in the wind.
She possessed a beauty that was mature, dangerous, and entirely untouchable. Her eyes looked down at the Dou Wang not as a threat, but as one might look at an annoying insect that had crawled onto a pristine dining table.