Chapter 39: Light Under the Stars (Part 2)
The night sky over the desert was torn open by a massive shadow.
The Void Herald, the clan's colossal warship, was not sailing; it was falling over the horizon like a black meteorite. On the highest mast, the immense crimson and black flag, bearing the emblem of the fallen star and the dragon, whipped with such violence that the fabric cracked like thunder.
On the ship's deck, the silence was absolute and suffocating.
Kael, Eris, Violeta, Cedric, Xylia, and Elowen stood motionless. Their Origin Realm auras, normally controlled, were leaking out, cracking the ship's spiritual wood. No one said a word. Kael's eyes were bloodshot, golden and fierce, shedding silent tears that evaporated before touching the ground from the sheer heat of his fury. She was his student. He had trained her.
At the bow, standing on the very edge of the abyss, was Samael.
The armor of shadows and obsidian covering his body absorbed the moonlight. His eyes, two unfathomable black holes, were fixed on the lights of the City of Red Sand that were beginning to outline themselves in the distance.
"Cedric," Samael's mental voice through the Nexus was an iceberg of absolute cold.
"The city's matrices are locked, Sovereign. No one can use teleportation amulets. I have raised walls of spiritual earth at the four cardinal points. It is a cage."
The warship crossed the walls of the vassal city without slowing down, stopping abruptly right in the center of the noble district, casting the streets into darkness beneath its immense shadow.
Samael didn't wait for the ship to descend. He dropped from the sky, landing with an impact that shattered the cobblestones of the main plaza and sent out a shockwave that blew out the windows of all the surrounding buildings.
Before him stood the immense gates of the Three Peaks Sect, the ruling faction of the city.
And there she was.
Hanging from the heavy iron rings of the main gate.
Clara's small, broken body swayed gently in the early morning wind. Her little travel clothes were torn and stained with dried blood. Her face, which hours before had shone with the excitement of buying a new scabbard, was disfigured by terror and brutality. And nailed cruelly into the center of her chest, glowing with a bluish light that seemed to mock the tragedy, was the Heaven Grade spiritual coin. The same coin Samael had given her to tell her to never give up.
The sect guards watching the entrance went pale at the sight of the obsidian monster landing in front of them. They tried to raise their spears, babbling warnings.
Samael didn't even look at them.
A wave of Absolute Void expanded from his body. The ten guards at the entrance didn't fly backward or scream; they simply imploded in silence, their flesh and bones compressed into red dust that the wind swept away in a blink.
Samael walked toward the immense wood and iron doors. The homicidal rage that made the space around him tremble vanished instantly, replaced by a heartbreaking gentleness.
He floated up a few inches to reach her. With extreme care, as if he feared breaking her even more, Samael removed the ropes from her neck and took her down from the rings. He cradled the apprentice's tiny, cold body in his arms.
Elowen and Violeta landed behind him. Elowen covered her mouth, choking back a heart-wrenching sob, while Violeta clenched her fists until her palms bled, the ground beneath her feet freezing to sub-zero temperatures.
Samael looked at the girl's face. With infinite gentleness, he removed the blood-stained spiritual coin from her chest, wiping it with the fabric of his own tunic before putting it away.
"I will take you home, little one," Samael whispered, his voice hoarse, stroking Clara's tangled hair. "You will rest beneath the roots of the Star Tree. We will build your tomb with the whitest marble on the mountain. You will have fresh flowers every morning for the rest of eternity... And I swear to you, by my soul, by my crown, and by the void itself, that this is the first and will be the last damned death in my family."
Samael turned to Elowen and, with the same gentleness, handed her the girl's body.
"Take her to the ship. Do not let anyone touch her body."
Elowen nodded, tears streaming down her face, and vanished in a flash of green light toward the Herald.
Samael stood in the plaza. He closed his void eyes for a second. A karmic thread, invisible to everyone but him, pulled at his instinct. The terror of Clara's final moments had left a mark on the flow of the world.
Guided by that ghostly echo, Samael began to walk. He moved away from the main sect and entered the narrow alleyways of the market, now deserted and silent from the panic his arrival had caused.
Kael, Cedric, and the others followed him in absolute silence, their weapons drawn, glaring death at any face that peeked out of the windows.
Samael stopped in a blind alley, dimly lit by a broken red lantern.
The stone floor was scuffed. There were drag marks. And in a corner, next to the dirty water gutters, lay the splintered remains of a small sandalwood box.
The Sovereign of the Void slowly knelt. Among the wood splinters, half-covered by the dust and the girl's blood, he found a pendant. It was a small sleeping dragon, finely forged in silver and pure obsidian. A gift. A present bought with the life savings of an orphan girl for the man who gave her back her hope.
Samael picked up the pendant. He wiped it with his thumb. The cold of the metal against his skin was the final snap. The last, definitive thread of sanity that kept Samael tethered to humanity broke cleanly.
He stood up, tucking the pendant into a hidden pocket near his heart.
When he turned to his generals, he was no longer Samael. He was annihilation incarnate.
"The Broken River Sects, the Iron Lotus Peak, and the Three Peaks," Samael's voice echoed not in the alley, but in the minds of all his heirs, cold and sharp as glass. "Listen to me well, legion. I don't want spatial rings. I don't want cultivation manuals. I don't want inheritances, or treasures, or spiritual stones. I don't want you to leave a single wall standing, a single beast of burden alive, or a single ant breathing in their foundations."
Samael held out his right hand. The space in front of him tore open, and from the pocket dimension stepped the two immense figures of his Saint-level puppets.
The Protector of the Frozen Abyss (Stage 1 Saint) emanated a chill from the grave, while the Dune Shadow (Semi-Saint) dripped liquid darkness from its daggers.
"Shadow," Samael ordered the assassin puppet, "go to the Broken River Sect. Exterminate them. Protector, handle the Iron Lotus Peak. Erase the mountain until it's a crater."
The two monstrosities nodded silently and vanished in a supersonic blink, unleashing their incomprehensible Saint-level power upon the city. Seconds later, catastrophic explosions began to echo in the northern and eastern ends of the city, followed by the agonizing screams of thousands of cultivators being massacred without mercy.
Samael looked at the immense gates of the Three Peaks Sect in front of him, the home of the assassins' leader.
"We will handle this one," Samael declared, unsheathing the colossal black blade of his Voracious Eclipse. "Kael. Lead the others. Burn the sect. I will go for the head of the snake."
The assault was a miniature apocalypse.
The solid iron gates of the Three Peaks were blown to pieces by a black fire spear from Eris. Kael entered like a god of death; his sword intent did not seek to wound, it sought to dismember. Every disciple, elder, or guard who crossed the legion's path was cut, frozen, electrocuted, or crushed by Cedric's gravitational formations.
Samael paid no attention to the screams of the massacre around him. He walked straight toward the central courtyard, where the oppressive aura of a Semi-Saint was beginning to rise, attempting to suppress the chaos.
The Patriarch of the Three Peaks, an old man in golden robes, emerged from his main tower.
"Insolent fools!" bellowed the Semi-Saint, though his eyes showed pure terror as he saw his sect turned into a slaughterhouse. "Samael Morningstar! We are a vassal sect! If you have a problem with my grandsons, we can compensate you! We will give you mines, women, artifacts! A commoner is not worth the destruction of a bloodli—!"
Samael didn't even let him finish the sentence.
With his Half-Step to Semi-Saint boiling in his veins, Samael ignored the rules of combat. He used the Step Between Dimensions and appeared directly in front of the Patriarch's face.
The old man tried to raise a Semi-Saint level Qi barrier, but Samael thrust his left hand, wreathed in pure Zero Gravity, straight through the shield as if it were wet paper, grabbing him by the face.
"Words are of no use to you anymore, old man," Samael whispered.
He raised the immense Odachi and, with a single brutal sweep of his arm, severed both of the Semi-Saint's legs at the knees.
The old man let out a heart-rending shriek, falling to the ground on his bleeding stumps. Before he could try to regenerate or counterattack, Samael stepped on the old man's chest, pinning him down, and plunged his hand into his Dantian. With a ruthless pull, he ripped out the Semi-Saint's golden core, destroying centuries of cultivation in a second, and crushed the core in his own fist until it turned to dust.
He left the sect leader bleeding out on the ground, crying in pain and agony, while the sect around him was burned to the foundations by Eris's Flame of Ruin.
Samael looked up. His Patriarch's Eye tracked three trembling, pathetic Qi signatures trying to hide in the subterranean escape tunnels beneath the main hall.
It was them.
Samael sheathed the Odachi. He would not use a sacred weapon for something so disgusting.
The marble floor beneath his boots collapsed, opening a hole straight into the catacombs. Samael floated down into the darkness.
The Hall of Torment
In the deep darkness of the sect's vault, the three young masters were huddled against an escape door blocked by Cedric's earth. They were pale, sweating cold. The drunkenness, lust, and arrogance of hours ago had evaporated, replaced by primordial terror as they listened to their powerful grandfathers being massacred above.
Samael landed in front of them. The sound of his boots against the stone echoed like the ticking of a clock marking the end of their existence.
"I-It was a mistake!" screamed the leader, the youth in the crane robes, crawling backward until he hit the rock wall, wetting his pants from the sheer pressure of Samael's aura. "We were drunk! We didn't know she was from your clan! Sovereign, spare our lives! We will be your slaves!"
The other two nodded frantically, crying on their knees.
Samael looked down at them. The darkness of his void eyes was so dense it seemed to absorb the tunnel's torches.
"The mistake wasn't being drunk. The mistake was believing you breathe the same air as us," Samael's voice was slow, methodical, devoid of any human emotion. "She screamed her name. She asked for help. And you decided she was a toy."
Samael slowly raised his right hand.
"I will not kill you quickly. You do not deserve the peace of death. I am going to show you exactly what absolute terror is."
Samael clenched his fist.
The Absolute Void was not used to annihilate. It was used as a microscopic scalpel.
The localized gravity was multiplied by a thousand, but only around the phalanges of the three youths.
The sound of dozens of small bones breaking simultaneously filled the vault. Their fingers, the same ones that had mistreated and hurt Clara, were crushed to pulp inside the skin, without spilling a single drop of blood outward.
All three let out inhuman shrieks, grabbing their deformed hands and falling to the floor in pure agony.
The leader tried to pass out from the shock of the pain, but Samael channeled his Dragon Qi directly into their minds. A searing energy that forced their consciousnesses to remain awake, lucid, and ultra-sensitive to the pain. He would not allow them the luxury of unconsciousness.
"That was only the surface skin of terror," Samael whispered, walking slowly around them.
Samael moved two fingers. Using his blood manipulation—refined since his days in the labyrinth—and the concept of the void, he altered the blood pressure inside their ears and eyes.
A sharp, piercing pain erupted in the skulls of the three youths. Darkness and silence fell upon them. Samael had rendered them blind and deaf in an instant.
He stripped them of the ability to see the cave and hear their companions' screams. Now, they were completely isolated in their own minds, surrounded by absolute darkness, feeling only the pain and the overwhelming presence of a god of death playing with their bodies.
The young leader, blind, deaf, and with shattered hands, drooled and screamed unintelligible words of absolute terror, trying to crawl blindly.
Samael raised his foot and brought it down slowly onto the boy's knee. He adjusted the gravity again. He didn't crush it with one blow. He used the void to apply a constant, torturously slow pressure. The youth felt his kneecap crack millimeter by millimeter, the bone splintering and digging into his own nerves in slow motion.
Time in that vault lost all meaning. For the monsters who had ruined innocence, every second felt like an eternity in purgatory.
Samael dismantled their meridians one by one. He used tiny spheres of zero gravity to suck the vitality from their internal organs without killing them. He tore away every shred of their young master pride, reducing them to masses of trembling, drooling, begging flesh, trapped in an infinite loop of pain, blindness, and silence.
When he finally decided that the vessel of their minds had been broken beyond all repair, Samael did not decapitate them.
With a fluid motion, he extended the Void toward their chests. He extracted the air from their lungs and stopped their hearts with absolute gravitational pressure. They died suffocated in their own darkness, drowning in the terror they themselves had sown.
Samael stood in the silence of the catacombs, surrounded by the three shattered corpses. His breathing was heavy, but the black hole in his chest had not been filled. Revenge did not cure loss, but it was the only language the universe respected.
The Patriarch turned and walked toward the surface.
Above, the City of Red Sand had ceased to exist.
The Protector of the Frozen Abyss had turned the east side into a wasteland of eternal frost, where no living being breathed. The Dune Shadow had massacred the north, leaving rivers of blood and silence. And the center, the Three Peaks Sect, was now a mountain of rubble burning with black flames, courtesy of the Morningstar Legion.
Kael, Cedric, Eris, Violeta, and Xylia stood before the smoking remains of the main gate. Their clothes were soaked in enemy blood, their eyes reflecting the total devastation.
They had carried out the order. Not a wall, not a treasure, not a breathing enemy remained. The most prosperous trade city in the region had been wiped off the map of history.
Samael emerged from the ruins. He walked into the center of his generals, his face shadowed by the night and the smoke.
Reaching into his tunic, he pulled out the silver and obsidian pendant shaped like a small dragon, clenching it in his fist until it hurt his palm.
He looked up at the Void Herald floating silently above the burning ruins.
"Home," Samael ordered, his voice devoid of all emotion.
The black ship slowly turned in the night sky, leaving behind a graveyard of ashes and death.
The message to the entire continent had been written with the blood of three entire sects: If you touch a single scale of the dragon, the entire Empire will burn with you.
(To be continued in Part 3...)