Chapter 25: The Night of Blood and Dragons (Part 2)
The battlefield in front of Skull Rock had transformed into a thermal nightmare. The colossal clash in the sky between the Blue Flame Spirit and the Protector of the Frozen Abyss had turned the frigid desert night into a cauldron of boiling steam. The fog was so dense that the Winter Guard soldiers, trained for close-formation combat, suddenly found themselves blind, disoriented, and isolated from their commanders.
But for the Morningstar Legion, the fog was not an obstacle; it was a theater curtain. And the play they were about to perform was a massacre.
In the vanguard, where the density of Valois troops was greatest, a figure moved with the lethal grace of a primordial predator.
Kael Morningstar did not possess the overwhelming cultivation of the leaders. The miracle of the Ascension had widened his meridians, but his realm remained anchored at the peak of the Qi Sea. To the soldiers and commanders of the Winter Guard, who boasted the Transcendent and Origin Realms, Kael's level was nothing more than that of a bug.
That was their first, and last, mistake.
A Valois lieutenant at Transcendent Stage 4 caught a glimpse of Kael's dark red hair through the steam. With a cruel smile, the lieutenant charged forward, his spear imbued with an Ice Qi that threatened to freeze the young man's blood from meters away.
Kael did not retreat. His Golden aura, the absolute mark of the Son of Destiny, glowed faintly beneath the mist. His right hand rested gently on the hilt of the Whisper of the North.
In his chest, the Sword Seed throbbed in unison with his killing intent.
"Sound is slower than intent," Kael whispered.
He executed the first movement of his evolutionary art: [Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash].
The instant his fingers closed over the leather of the hilt, the technique's base effect, Acoustic Void, activated. A small bubble of zero pressure enveloped his sword's sheath. Kael unsheathed.
There was no characteristic metallic "click." There was no howl of steel tearing through the wind. Acoustic physics were completely nullified. The Valois lieutenant only saw a beautiful, silver flash crossing the steam before his eyes. A second later, when the whistle of the attack finally reached the enemy soldier's ears, his throat had already been cleanly severed.
The Transcendent's body fell to its knees, blood gushing out in torrents, while Kael was already sheathing his sword and fixing his golden eyes on the next target. His dance was a world of absolute silence where only death ruled.
"Kill that brat! He's massacring us!" shouted an Origin Realm Commander, realizing that a mere Qi Sea cultivator was slicing his lieutenants like straw.
A dozen elite Valois soldiers broke formation and lunged at Kael, unleashing a rain of ice arrows and steel javelins.
Kael didn't even have to draw his sword to defend himself. The air around him suddenly distorted, rippling like asphalt under the midday sun.
The arrows and javelins that were about to pierce the young man melted mid-air or were violently deflected by extreme thermal currents before touching him. It was the Phoenix Song, the passive thermal defense of Grand Elder Lilith, who had just entered the battlefield.
Lilith, at Transcendent Stage 7 and with her mutated Phoenix blood boiling with ancestral rage, did not wield a physical weapon. She concentrated her vast Qi Sea into her single sound hand. Flames of ash and gold swirled, condensing to forge a massive spear of pure crystallized fire.
She activated the [Red Jade Manual: Heaven-Piercing Phoenix Spear].
With a leap that cracked the crystallized sand, Lilith jumped dozens of meters into the fog-covered sky. Reaching the apex of her jump, she plummeted straight down toward the group of soldiers surrounding Kael.
"Descent of the Igneous Phoenix," the Grand Elder intoned.
The friction of her fall and her Fire Qi created the illusion of an immense bird of flames engulfing the spear. Lilith impacted the ground like a meteorite. The deflagration was monumental. The fiery shockwave melted the heavy silver armors of the Valois soldiers instantly, calcining their meridians and reducing them to smoking ashes before they could even scream.
The Origin Realm Commander, who had managed to retreat in time to avoid immediate incineration, roared in fury and charged at the one-armed old woman, unsheathing a heavy greatsword.
Lilith did not back down. Her style was total offense. She launched herself at the Commander, executing the Setting Sun Thrust.
Her movements were so fast that the spear of fire seemed to multiply. One, two, three. Three lightning-fast thrusts struck the Commander's thick ice breastplate. They didn't seem to cause direct physical damage, but they left three points of blinding, incandescent light etched into his armor.
The Commander smiled, believing he had withstood the attack. Lilith returned a smile of pure pity and snapped her fingers.
The three heat points detonated simultaneously. The Origin Realm Commander exploded from within, his ice breastplate fragmenting along with his ribcage.
Seeing that the right flank was beginning to be pressured by the sheer number of enemy troops, Lilith raised her hand to the sky. Concentrating her reserves, she created dozens of lesser fire spears and arrows in the air around her. With a powerful sweeping gesture, she unleashed a rain of incendiary artillery upon the Valois ranks, providing cover for the Morningstar squads and opening breaches for Kael to continue his silent dance of death.
If the vanguard was an exhibition of technical prowess, the main entrance to Skull Rock was, quite literally, hell on earth itself.
It was the bottleneck that the Valois army desperately needed to secure to assault the citadel. There, the Twins awaited them.
Violeta and Eris stood before the immense obsidian gates. There was no fear in their eyes; only the cold, calculated execution of their training.
A platoon of fifty men armed with tower shields tried to force their way through, marching in a testudo (tortoise) formation to protect themselves from arrows.
Violeta took a step forward, her heterochromic eyes shining in the darkness. She conjured all her freezing Qi and swept her Lunar Frost Waltz low to the ground. A wave of Absolute Ice crept across the sand at a terrifying speed. Upon making contact with the boots and lower shields of the Valois formation, the cold didn't just stop them; it froze steel, flesh, and bone down to absolute zero. The soldiers' limbs became rigid as blue glass. The entire platoon was petrified in place, unable to advance a millimeter.
"Your turn, sister!" Violeta yelled, taking a step back.
Eris vaulted over Violeta, her Phoenix Spear blazing with volcanic fury. She landed hard in front of the frozen formation and slammed the shaft of her spear against the ground.
A fan-shaped blast of flame, hot as the core of a planet, swept over the frozen platoon.
The science behind the Taboo Red Destiny manifested in the most gruesome way possible. The extreme thermal shock between the ice that had made the steel brittle and the fire that violently expanded it had a catastrophic result. The armors, shields, and legs of the fifty Valois soldiers shattered into a thousand pieces with a sound similar to massive panes of glass being crushed.
The agonized screams of the mutilated men filled the air, but they were quickly silenced when Eris unleashed a second blast of flame that incinerated the remains. The Twins' wall was unbreakable; they had turned the gates of their home into a veritable meat grinder.
Above all that earthly horror, floating majestically over the highest obsidian battlements, was Xylia Morningstar.
The Thunder Empress had completely unleashed her newly refined bloodline following the assimilation of the Heritage Crystal. Although her true dragon blood remained sealed to protect her mortal body, its influence was undeniable. Fine, translucent black and white scales pulsed on her neck and forearms, crackling with static electricity.
Her eyes were rolled back, channeling the pure power of the sky.
"The storm obeys me," Xylia whispered, raising both arms.
She activated the Weather Mandate.
The dense clouds of boiling steam created by the two Saints in the sky began to darken, swirling into an unnatural vortex above the invading army.
Thunder rumbled, silencing even the screams of the battle below.
Xylia brought her arms down violently.
Pure lightning bolts—some blindingly white and others a deep black that seemed to absorb light—struck down from the vortex like heavy artillery. Every bolt that hit the rear ranks of the Winter Guard didn't just electrocute; the sheer kinetic force of the lightning kicked up ten-meter-high columns of sand, pulverizing entire squads and bursting the eardrums of the survivors. Xylia was a divine siege turret, punishing anyone who tried to organize a second wave against the gates.
But if Kael was the steel, the twins the wall, and Xylia the artillery, the true destruction of the Winter Guard army's morale was happening in the deepest darkness, far from the flashes of lightning and fire.
The Northern army was composed of elites who did not fear death in direct combat. But the human mind is not designed to fight against what it cannot comprehend.
Amidst the thick, suffocating fog, in the areas where the light of the fires did not reach, Valois soldiers began to disappear.
There were no clashes of swords. There were no war cries. Simply, a soldier marching next to his comrade would vanish in the blink of an eye.
Malak, the Mythic Reaper, and his newly strengthened Legion of Shadows did not fight head-on. To them, martial honor was a stupid concept reserved for corpses. Floating beneath the sand and slipping through the shadows cast by their enemies' own armor, the specters executed a war of absolute psychological terror.
A Valois sergeant watched in horror as the soldier in front of him suddenly sank into the hard sand, as if the ground had turned to water. Two arms formed of solid black smoke had grabbed him by the ankles, dragging him down into the subterranean darkness. The soldier barely had time to let out a muffled scream before disappearing, leaving only his silver helmet on the sand.
"Close ranks! Attack from the ground!" bellowed the sergeant, banging his sword against his shield.
But it was useless. From the sergeant's very own shadow, Malak emerged in absolute silence. The massive, faceless being raised his rusted scythe and, with a smooth motion, sliced off the man's head. Before the decapitated body hit the ground, the Legion of Shadows had already dragged the remains into the darkness to feed on his Qi and terror.
Paranoia gripped the elite of the Winter Guard. The soldiers began spinning in circles, stabbing at empty air and launching frantic attacks against their own shadows. Order had broken. The Northern elite was crumbling, suffocated by fear, ground to dust by ice and fire, and electrocuted by the sky.
The invasion of Skull Rock had become a mass suicide.
And while the Morningstar Legion devoured the army on the ground, a few kilometers away in the darkness, Samael Morningstar raised his Odachi, ready to end the brutal, bloody combat against the Dune Shadow who tried to snatch his kingdom from him.
Chapter 25: The Night of Blood and Dragons (Conclusion)
The combat between Samael and the Dune Shadow had reached a lethal boiling point. In the midst of the boiling fog and the carnage the Morningstar Legion was unleashing around them, the Semi-Saint assassin was beginning to lose his composure.
His speed was unquestionable, gliding across the sand like a wraith and launching dozens of compressed wind slashes that would have torn any Origin Realm cultivator to shreds. But every time he managed to bypass the guard of the massive black Odachi and land a direct hit on Samael's torso or neck, his daggers simply cut through empty air. The Void Dragon Imperial Armor and its passive, the Mantle of Nonexistence, rendered the Patriarch's body "blurry" to the physical laws of this world in the millisecond of impact.
Frustration and terror began to cloud the assassin's judgment. An executioner who cannot touch his victim is a dead man.
Desperate, the Dune Shadow made the mistake Samael had been waiting for. In an attempt to overload the armor's defense, the Semi-Saint concentrated all his Qi into a single frontal attack, a whirlwind of sand and wind blades, leaving his flanks and his feet completely exposed to the earth.
Samael smiled. His violet eyes flashed with predatory cruelty.
He did not try to dodge the whirlwind. Instead, he stomped the obsidian and sand ground with titanic force. Around him lay dozens of corpses from the Valois vanguard soldiers. Samael channeled his Beginner Stage Blood manipulation.
The spilled blood within a twenty-meter radius didn't levitate like spears this time; it crept across the sand like red snakes at a terrifying speed. Just as the assassin propelled himself to launch his final attack, thick shackles of boiling, crystallized blood surged from the ground, violently coiling around the Dune Shadow's ankles and wrists.
The assassin's attack was abruptly interrupted. He was immobilized in mid-air, suspended a meter off the ground. The blood shackles wouldn't hold the strength of a Semi-Saint for more than a second.
But Samael didn't need more than a second.
The heavy blade of the Ravenous Eclipse, which was already glowing with a blinding crimson radiance after the dozens of kills accumulated on the battlefield, cleaved through the air.
SLASH!
A horizontal slash, brutal and devoid of all mercy, cleanly separated the assassin's hooded head from his shoulders. Blood gushed like a hot spring as the Dune Shadow's body collapsed onto the sand. The Odachi's passive, Bloodlust, reached its absolute maximum limit. The blade vibrated, hot to the touch, exuding a +50% accumulated cutting power.
Samael did not pause to admire his work. The sudden silence around him was interrupted by a deafening roar coming from the firmament.
He looked up. High in the night sky, the celestial battle was coming to an end.
The Blue Flame Spirit, summoned through the Mythic Seal, was flickering violently. It had served its purpose: its fire had held back the blizzard and severely burned the left arm and face of the Protector of the Frozen Abyss. However, its energy was depleting rapidly. Its body of spiritual fire was losing cohesion.
Opposite it, the Valois Protector, a True Saint, was breathing heavily. His robes were scorched, and his pale skin showed severe burns, but his pupil-less eyes burned with an apocalyptic fury. The Saint was gathering all the Qi from his core and the power of his Ice Law for one final, massive attack: a glacial spear the size of a building, designed not only to extinguish the Spirit but to crash down upon Skull Rock and bury it forever in absolute zero.
The Fire Spirit won't withstand that impact, Samael calculated, feeling the chill of death descending upon his clan. And if that spear touches the ground, not even my armor will be able to save my people.
Samael knew he only had one chance. A single move before the Protector unleashed his Law.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, blocking out the noise of the war at his feet. He concentrated his mind to the absolute maximum. In his Origin core, his Qi reserves were dropping drastically, but he ignored the fatigue. He channeled the accumulated fury of the 50% Bloodlust directly into the black blade of his Odachi.
Then, he took a deep breath and fused two concepts that should never touch in the hands of a mortal.
He took the rudimentary Minor Law of Space that had caused him to stumble minutes earlier, and wrapped it in the dark, absolute energy of his Void affinity. This time, he didn't try to be elegant. He used pure Void as a cosmic sponge to absorb and erase any ripple, noise, or dimensional disturbance his spatial leap might generate. He wanted the universe itself to ignore his movement.
Samael opened his eyes.
He disappeared.
There was no burst of air. There was no flash of light. The Sovereign of the Void simply ceased to exist on the desert floor.
Five hundred meters in the air, the Protector of the Frozen Abyss raised his hands to hurl the immense glacial spear down onto the citadel. But just as his muscles tensed for the throw, a shiver that had nothing to do with his Ice Law ran down his spine. It was the most primitive instinct of a living being: the absolute terror of being prey.
The Protector tried to turn his head, tried to expand his divine sense to detect the threat.
It was too late.
Samael had materialized exactly half a meter behind the True Saint's back, floating in mid-air. The Void had erased his trail so perfectly that not even a Saint saw him coming.
Samael raised the Odachi above his head. Forty percent of the entirety of his vast Qi Sea was instantly drained in a single, colossal effort, injected into the weapon alongside the 50% damage accumulated from the previous slaughter.
"[Void Sword Manual: Dimensional Slash]," Samael sentenced, his voice ringing against the back of the Protector's neck like a gravedigger's bell.
Samael brought the sword down.
The attack did not travel through the air. It did not collide against the thick, multiple passive shields of absolute ice surrounding the Saint's body. The slash bent and ignored distance itself, cutting through the very fabric of reality.
Reality tore like an old canvas.
The thick glacial spear the Protector held in his hands split in half and dissolved into harmless snow. A thin, black line appeared in the exact center of the head, neck, and spine of the Protector of the Frozen Abyss.
The True Saint didn't even have time to scream. His blue eyes faded. His body, cleanly divided into two perfect halves, began to fall from the sky, leaving a trail of blood and viscera that froze before touching the hot sand of the battlefield.
The instant the slash was completed, Samael let out a muffled roar.
A blinding, agonizing pain erupted inside his body. The consecutive use of the Law of Space, combined with the overwhelming pressure of the Void and having forced a perfect Dimensional Slash with a mortal body, took its toll on him. He felt as if ground glass had been injected into his veins. His meridians tore microscopically throughout his torso and arms.
Samael began to plummet toward the earth, unable to maintain flight, but at the last second, the Void Dragon Imperial Armor reacted to his critical state, slowing his fall just enough for him to land heavily on his knees in the dunes, kicking up a cloud of white dust.
The battlefield was left in a sepulchral silence.
The fog and boiling steam began to dissipate under the moonlight, carried away by the freezing breeze that followed the collapse of the Saint's Law.
What was left in plain sight was a scene of absolute nightmare and glory.
Five hundred corpses of the elite Valois Winter Guard covered the dunes, torn to pieces, burned, frozen, or headless. The Dune Shadow lay decapitated near the walls. And a few meters from Samael, the two halves of the invincible Protector of the Frozen Abyss stained the pristine sand.
Kael, with his armor covered in enemy blood and his sword still dripping, looked at the scene with bated breath. On the walls, Violeta and Eris lowered their weapons, their hands trembling from Qi exhaustion, while Lilith and Xylia watched from the heights with a reverential awe bordering on religious devotion. Malak and his specters emerged from the shadows, bowing their faceless heads toward their master.
Samael, with one knee in the sand, used the heavy Odachi as a cane to stand up. His breathing was rough and heavy. Every movement sent waves of pain through his torn meridians, but his posture did not falter. He raised his chin and looked straight toward the distant North, his violet eyes shining with a promise of death.
Deep in his retina, the world lit up with letters of the purest gold. The System had begun its tally of the carnage.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CALAMITY EVENT OVERCOME!][Battle Evaluation: Impossible Triumph.][Achievement Unlocked: 'Heaven Slayer' - You have executed a True Saint Level enemy while in the Origin Realm.][Achievement Unlocked: 'Shadow's Death' - You have executed a Semi-Saint enemy.][Total Annihilation: Valois Army (500 Elite Units, 60 Transcendents, 3 Origin) destroyed.][Processing Massive Karmic Survival Rewards...]
+50,000 Absolute Battle Luck Points. Auto-Loot: All Beast Cores, Spiritual Stones, and Weapons (Earth/Heaven Grade) of the fallen army have been secured in the Inventory. Pure Law Core (Ice): Extracted from the fallen Valois Saint. (Critical material for Mythic forging or Element evolution).
[SUPREME REWARD GRANTED!][The 'Celestial Calamity Chest' (DIVINE Quality) has materialized. The rewards await in the Soul Vault.]
Samael read the golden notifications as the wind rustled his white hair and the blood of demigods soaked the sand at his feet. The pain in his meridians was sharp and real, but the power he had just secured for his clan was incalculable.
A slow, dark, and deeply predatory smile spread across his tilted face.
The first wave of the cataclysm had crashed against his walls and shattered into a thousand pieces. Duke Alaric Valois had sent his best assassins and a god of winter to wipe some exiles off the map.
Instead, they had just shown the world that a Primordial Dragon had awakened in the Dragon Bone Desert.
"They have made their final mistake," Samael whispered to the freezing wind blowing toward the North. "Now... I will come for you."
END OF CHAPTER 25