Chapter 25: The Night of Blood and Dragons (Part 1)
The Dragon Bone Desert lay buried under a suffocating darkness. The moon hung in the firmament like a white, relentless eye, casting a cold light over an ocean of sand that seemed to stretch into infinity.
But that night, the desert was not empty.
Five hundred elite soldiers of the Winter Guard marched in a perfect wedge formation. Their silver armors, forged with frigid steel from the Northern mountains, did not clink or emit any sound. They were a silent tide of death, led by sixty cultivators in the Transcendent Realm and three supreme Commanders in the Origin Realm.
At the head of this army marched a man who did not touch the sand. He floated half a meter off the ground, with his hands clasped behind his back. His hair was as white as virgin snow, and his eyes lacked pupils, glowing with a glacial blue light. He was the Protector of the Frozen Abyss, a True Saint. With every meter he advanced, the ambient temperature plummeted, freezing the grains of sand beneath him into a path of glass.
The army stopped abruptly.
The First Valois Commander, a giant at Stage 6 of the Origin Realm, frowned and consulted the spiritual compass carved from bone that he held in his hand.
"My Lord," he addressed the Protector, with his head bowed in a sign of reverence. "We have reached the exact coordinates the trackers sent before they died. But... there is nothing."
The Protector slightly raised his chin. Before them, illuminated by the moon, there were only immense, rolling sand dunes. No obsidian walls, no oasis, no fortress. Only the emptiness of the desert. The five hundred elite soldiers exchanged confused glances. Had the Morningstars fled? Was it a trap?
"The ignorance of mortals is a pitiful disease," whispered the Protector. His voice was not a sound, but a gust of freezing wind that cut the ears of his men.
The True Saint was not looking at the sand. He was looking at the very fabric of space. Because he had touched the Laws of the Universe, his eyes could perceive what an ordinary mind could not: the moonlight in front of them was not falling naturally. It curved, sliding over a colossal, invisible dome. It was the Identity Refraction, the pinnacle of the "Art of the Ten Thousand Mirrors Formation" that Cedric Morningstar had anchored to the citadel. A giant prism that projected the empty horizon over the fortress.
A perfect illusion to deceive armies. A fragile glass before a Saint.
The Protector of the Frozen Abyss raised his right hand, pale and lined with blue veins. He did not utter any chant. He simply released a conceptual pulse of his Ice Law.
"Shatter."
The space in front of the entire army froze instantly. The air became solid, revealing the immense dome of invisible mirrors that was now covered in frost. With a deafening crack that made the Commanders' ears bleed, the illusion shattered into millions of fragments of light.
The mirage disappeared, revealing the majestic, dark, and brutal reality.
Less than a hundred meters from them stood the imposing obsidian walls of Skull Rock. And dominating the cavern, the crimson and black spire of the Dragon Tower pierced the night sky. Atop the walls, three hundred warriors dressed in black watched them in sepulchral silence, with their weapons drawn.
The invasion had begun.
The Protector showed no surprise. His face was a mask of absolute arrogance. He looked at the "children" on the walls with the contempt of a god watching ants.
"Let the blood of these heretics water the sands. Leave no one al—"
The Protector stopped. His pupil-less eyes widened with fury. He felt an aura of defiance emanating from the top of the obsidian gate.
There stood Samael Morningstar. The Sovereign of the Void looked down at him from the heights, wrapped in the mysterious and dark Void Dragon Imperial Armor. The armor seemed to absorb the moonlight, an exoskeleton of liquid obsidian with a Dragon Heart beating in deep red in the center of his chest. At first glance, he was a deity of death.
"Insolent brat!" roared the Protector, losing his calm before the arrogant gaze of a mere Origin Realm cultivator. "Your cursed bloodline freezes today!"
The True Saint raised both hands toward the sky. The air above Skull Rock crackled. A massive blizzard cloud, loaded with the absolute authority of the Ice Law, began to condense at a terrifying speed. If that blizzard touched the fortress, the Dantians of the three hundred Morningstar disciples, of Kael, the twins, and Cedric, would freeze and shatter in a single second. It was certain annihilation. A continental-level attack compressed into a storm.
Samael did not step back. There was no panic in his violet eyes. He extracted a small blue jade plate from his spatial ring that burned with an internal fire.
"Not in my lands, old man," Samael whispered.
He clenched his fist and crushed the Summoning Seal.
The entire sky roared in response. It wasn't the thunder of a storm; it was the war cry of a millennial entity. From the crushed jade dust in Samael's hand, a pillar of blue, spiritual fire shot into the firmament, colliding head-on with the Saint's blizzard cloud.
The light blinded both armies. When their vision returned, a colossal figure floated over the battlefield. It was the Blue Flame Spirit. A fifteen-meter-tall humanoid, composed entirely of pure spiritual fire, faceless but with an overwhelming presence. It exuded the absolute power of a True Saint at Stage 1.
The Spirit did not wait for orders. It was bound by the blood contract to destroy the greatest threat. It dived straight for the Valois Protector.
"A Fire Saint?!" howled the Protector, crossing his arms to summon a shield of glaciers.
The impact of the two Saints shattered the physics of the battlefield. Spiritual Fire against Absolute Ice. The clash of extreme temperatures in the middle of the cold desert created a devastating thermal explosion. Millions of liters of boiling steam erupted in all directions, covering the dunes, the walls, and the armies in an oppressive white fog, thick as milk.
The boiling steam acted as a karmic insulator. The crushing pressure of the Valois Saint's aura, which until a second ago had immobilized the Morningstar disciples, vanished, nullified by the Spirit's fire.
Samael unsheathed his Odachi, the Ravenous Eclipse, feeling the black blade vibrate in his hands. The playing field was leveled. The sky belonged to the gods; the earth was his.
"Morningstar Legion!" Samael's voice pierced the boiling fog. "Massacre them!"
Samael leaped from the obsidian wall, falling like a black meteor into the midst of the Winter Guard ranks, who were blinded by the steam.
Upon landing, the slaughter began. Samael needed to charge his sword's power. The passive skill Bloodlust required sacrifices. With every decapitated enemy, the edge would heat up and increase its cutting power by 1%. He needed to reach 50% quickly.
A group of five heavily armored Valois soldiers charged at him. Samael tried to use his movement technique, the Shadow Step (Evolved). His intention was to "dive" into the shadow cast by a nearby rock and appear behind them.
His body began to disintegrate into particles of pure darkness. For exactly 0.5 seconds, he entered "Phase Transition," becoming completely intangible. The Valois soldiers' spears passed through his chest as if stabbing smoke.
Threshold Leap, Samael thought, trying to connect his shadow with that of the soldiers.
But the control was clumsy. The link broke. Instead of appearing elegantly and silently behind his enemies, Samael was prematurely spat out of the shadow dimension two meters away, stumbling slightly and kicking up a cloud of dust. He grunted in frustration. The Laws of the world and Saint Grade techniques required a comprehension that sheer willpower could not replace overnight.
"He's vulnerable! Kill the Patriarch!" a Valois Commander yelled, taking advantage of the stumble.
Samael gritted his teeth. If subtlety didn't work, the world would burn. His Dragon Physique and his Blood manipulation activated.
The corpses of the Valois soldiers that the base's array had incinerated moments before lay nearby. Samael extended his left hand. The control was rudimentary, typical of the Beginner Stage of his blood ability, but the brute force of the Origin Realm compensated for the lack of finesse.
Pools of boiling blood levitated from the sand, twisting and solidifying into dozens of crude but lethal crimson spears. With a sweep of his arm, he fired them like heavy artillery. The blood spears shattered the silver armors of the vanguard, impaling the soldiers and pinning them to the dunes.
Samael advanced through the fog. A slash. Two dead. The blade of the Odachi began to glow with a faint reddish light. The Bloodlust was increasing. Three percent. Five percent.
He tried spatial displacement again. He merged his rudimentary Void control with the Minor Law of Space to erase the dimensional ripples of his movement. He fired three small balls of condensed Void toward an oncoming Commander, forcing him to dodge, and used the microsecond of distraction to teleport.
FWOOSH!
This time, the jump was better. He appeared right next to the Commander and, with a clean cut, separated his head from his shoulders. Eight percent charge.
But on the battlefield, true lethality rarely comes from the front.
Taking advantage of the absolute chaos, the scalding steam, and Samael's frantic hunt, a microscopic disturbance moved through the sand itself. It was the Dune Shadow. The Semi-Saint Stage 1 mercenary assassin had not died in the initial clash; he had been waiting, hidden in the earth, merged with the laws of the desert, waiting for the Patriarch's slightest blind spot.
Samael raised his Odachi to execute another guard, leaving his back exposed for a quarter of a second.
The sand behind him exploded without a sound. The Dune Shadow surged like a wraith, wielding two curved daggers oozing with highly compressed wind Qi. The attack was perfect. Calculated to ignore elemental defenses and pierce the heart directly from behind.
The daggers struck the center of Samael's back.
The Semi-Saint assassin smiled beneath his mask, expecting to feel the satisfying crunch of parting vertebrae.
But he felt nothing. Literally, nothing.
The wind blades passed right through Samael's Void Dragon Imperial Armor as if the Sovereign were a mere holographic projection. The Mythic relic's passive skill, the Mantle of Nonexistence, had detected the lethal threat that lacked the weight of a Law of Reality (being a physical attack imbued with wind) and had rendered Samael's body "blurry" to the laws of the world for an instant.
The assassin stumbled forward, carried by the inertia of his own failed attack, completely in shock. His daggers had cut air.
Samael, catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, felt the cold fury of the dragon flood his chest. An assassin in my own home.
Quickly, he channeled his newly acquired Minor Law of Space. His intention was to teleport instantly one meter backward, reappearing exactly behind the off-balance assassin to decapitate him in a single motion.
The space warped. Samael disappeared.
And reappeared... one meter to the left of where he intended.
His lack of synchrony with the Spatial Law worked against him. His right foot collided with the corpse of a Valois soldier upon materializing, making him stumble sideways, losing the perfect angle of attack and missing the clean strike that would have ended the fight.
Damn it! The spatial anchoring of this dimension is denser than I remembered, Samael grunted in his mind, regaining his balance immediately. Mastering a Law was not a parlor trick; it was bending the rules of the universe, and he was still a novice at that game in this body.
The Dune Shadow, being a veteran expert, recovered from his surprise in milliseconds. Seeing his target's clumsiness, his eyes shone with contempt.
"You have great toys, Patriarch," the assassin hissed, his voice resonating from all directions in the fog. "But you don't know how to use them. You're a child wearing a giant's crown."
The assassin spun around, unleashing a gale of razor-sharp wind slashes that tore through the steam and sand, aimed at the exposed joints where the mythic armor did not fully cover.
Samael let out a dry, hoarse laugh, laden with a primordial wrath. Frustrated by his own spatial incompetence and the limits of his ethereal abilities, the Sovereign of the Void stopped trying to be subtle. He discarded the finesse of shadow leaps and calculated teleportations.
"If I can't cut you through space... I'll cut you down to the bone," Samael roared.
His violet pupils narrowed, taking the shape of reptile slits. The aura of his Dragon Physique erupted. The sheer brute force of his blood crushed the sand beneath his feet.
Samael gripped the hilt of the Odachi with both hands. He forced the assassin into a bloody, frantic, extremely close-quarters melee. The sound of clashing metal rang out like hammer blows in a forge.
The Dune Shadow was fast, incredibly agile, dodging the heavy attacks of the black greatsword with movements as fluid as the wind. But every time the assassin attempted a counterattack, he crashed against Samael's physical invulnerability or the overwhelming pressure of his Origin aura.
Samael did not retreat. He advanced like a runaway beast. With his free left hand, he didn't summon space; he summoned carnage. He concentrated the Void and the Blood from the open wounds of the fallen soldiers around them, forming a spinning shield of crystallized blood saws that forced the assassin to stay on the defensive.
"Broken Moon Slash!" Samael bellowed.
He channeled purplish Qi into the blade of the Ravenous Eclipse. The Odachi emitted a terrifying hum. Samael unleashed a wave of concentrated Qi in the shape of a crescent moon. The Dune Shadow tried to block it by crossing his daggers and summoning a barrier of compacted sand and wind, a defensive formation that would have stopped the strike of any Transcendent.
But the "Broken Moon Slash" ignored inferior formations. The black wave passed through the sand barrier as if it didn't exist, striking directly against the assassin's chest and launching him ten meters backward through the boiling fog.
While the Patriarch and the Dune Shadow engaged in a duel to the death in the dark, in the sky above them, the Blue Flame Spirit and the Protector of the Frozen Abyss continued their celestial war, ignorant of the carnage unleashing at their feet, where the true Morningstar Legion was beginning to bare its fangs.