Chapter 99: Clash of Divinities (Part 1)
I. The Sky is Tinged with Judgment
The sky above the Morningstar Citadel had transformed into a nightmare vault.
The dreadnought Wrath of Heaven hung over the mountain horizon like a living threat. Its massive hull of obsidian and silver reflected the purple lightning tearing the surrounding atmosphere. Beneath the ship's belly, the divine artifact, the Purple Heaven Hammer, was suspended between three gigantic rings of runic energy.
It vibrated with a force as ancient as the resentment of a fallen god. Every pulse emitted by the weapon's core rippled through the air and down to the city, making the millennial stones of the walls tremble and the crimson leaves of the Star Tree instinctively curl up.
The barometric pressure was such that even disciples at the peak of the Origin Realm felt as if a thousand-handed giant were trying to crush them into the earth. The air was dense, biting, and saturated with the metallic smell of ozone.
The System, invisible to everyone except Samael, did not blink red; it bled frantic warnings in the center of his vision.
[Critical Alert: Artifact Charge at 90%.]
[Tactical Threat: Estimated impact equivalent to True Saint Stage 4 (Amplified by Heaven Grade Artifact).]
[Probability of main mountain barrier collapse: 100%. Extinction imminent.]
But at the bow of the Herald of the Void, Samael Morningstar showed not a hint of terror. He stood tall, his black cape billowing violently. His aura, for the first time since the clan's awakening, was uncontained. A column of Qi that was pure black Void and thick crimson Blood rose from his body, so dense it looked like a bottomless pit, tearing the clouds around him.
His eyes, which were no longer those of a human, but vertical pupils crossed by dark violet irises with flashes of the galaxies he had witnessed in his vision, shone with a cold, calculated hostility.
A slight, strange tremor ran through the citadel beneath them, as if the earth itself recognized that, high up in the clouds, the balance of power on the continent had been permanently broken.
"They think we are prey trapped in a stone cage," Samael's voice, distorted and amplified by the pure Law of the Void, boomed across the spiritual and physical planes, vibrating the armor of his own men. "They have forgotten that the abyss is always hungry."
To his right, Kael Morningstar nodded in silence. The King of the Vanguard sharpened the enormous dark blade of Whisper of the North with a flick of his wrist. His muscles were tense as siege springs, his jaw clenched, his Sword Heart beating with a steady rhythm that rejected panic.
To his left, Eris kept her gaze fixed on the sky, her hair waving like a white flame, her gloved hand resting on the hilt of her burning spear. The black fire of ruin smoked subtly from her shoulders.
Right behind them, Malak was a blur of pure shadow, his eyes glowing like dying coals, waiting for the order to unleash his hundred specters hanging in the air like invisible vampires. Livia, Torian, Sela, and Marcus, the Half-Saints, occupied the lower deck, ready to clear the trash. Lilith and Seraphina—along with the massive Saint-grade puppet the Ice Empress had summoned—stood ready to intercept the enemy deities.
But the key to the invasion was held by Violeta.
The young assassin closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Her exposed eye glowed with a spectral blue light, connecting with the erratic pulse of space between their ship and the enemy colossus.
"Violeta," Samael ordered with a barely perceptible gesture of his gloved hand. "Synchronize with me. You mark the destination. I break the door."
Violeta nodded without hesitation.
Her deep blue eye lit up intensely, and suddenly, specks of silver and fine geometric lines began to spin within her pupil like gears of a cosmic clock. She was reading the Weave of the World.
"The dreadnought's main shield is a spherical pressure wall..." Violeta whispered, her mind operating at maximum speed. "But the south node of the barrier array has a temporary micro-fracture. There is a 0.3-second defect in its runic rotation. It generates a vibration echo in space right before the central pulse."
"Enough," Samael declared.
II. The Dimensional Assault
Violeta crossed her arms over her chest and activated the [Bridge Between Worlds].
Because she was at the edge of Stage 8 of the Origin Realm, her teleportation technique was designed for short-range tactical assaults (10 to 15 meters), not for boarding a battleship miles away.
Violeta's body did not fade gradually; it compressed inward. It looked as if space itself was being sucked into an infinite point in the center of her chest. The air around her folded into violent concentric circles, creating a lens effect that distorted the Herald's deck.
A rift opened in reality in front of the Morningstar ship's bow. It wasn't an elegant magic circle; it was a literal tear in the air, revealing an interior of galactic violet and platinum, a matte black wake attempting to project itself toward the enemy dreadnought.
But the bridge wasn't long enough. It would fall short.
It was then that Samael Morningstar imposed his will upon the universe.
The Patriarch didn't just enter the bridge Violeta had created; he reached out and grabbed the edges of the spatial rift with his fingers wrapped in dark energy.
He used the [Law of Space].
To a True Saint who mastered the supreme law, Violeta's bridge was just clay. Samael didn't stretch the rift; he applied Distance Compression. He "folded" the space separating the Herald from the Wrath of Heaven.
The firmament visually crumpled like a discarded piece of paper.
Samael and Violeta "unstiched" dimensions.
The matte black and galactic violet rift expanded exponentially, enveloping the Sequences, the Elders, the Puppet, and the 100 Shadows.
For an absolute millisecond, the group traveled through the anomaly. They left a trail of visual static behind them. The defense arrays of the Wrath of Heaven, shields of light that could withstand siege cannons, detected no ballistic or magical intrusion. They could not detect that the spatial coordinates within their own deck had been temporarily rewritten.
CRACK!
The sound was identical to a cathedral stained-glass window snapping in half.
Samael Morningstar and his clan's elite "burst" back into reality directly in the center of the immense main deck of the dreadnought Wrath of Heaven.
The sonic shockwave of their arrival displaced the air with such violence that it snuffed out the fires of nearby cannons and stopped the wind for a second. The dark robes of the Morningstars seemed to float, as if they hadn't yet remembered the laws of gravity.
The stunned silence lasted a heartbeat. And then, chaos erupted.
Three thousand elite soldiers of the Purple Light Sect surrounded the immense steel deck. Their weapons were raised, the heavy shield formations gleamed, and three rows of archers had their bows drawn with arrows wrapped in crackling runic lightning, prepared to defend the ship from any flying boarding party.
The spatial burst in the exact center of their formation unleashed hoarse shouts; some out of pure horror at seeing their unbreakable shields bypassed, others out of blind military defiance.
The lightning arrows were about to rain down upon them.
Samael Morningstar didn't even bother to look at the archers. He didn't unsheathe the Odachi hanging on his back. He took a single, heavy, measured step forward.
The Patriarch dropped the conceptual weight of the Pressure of a True Saint combined with the unfathomable density of his Law of the Void.
"Kneel."
The word was not a war cry. It was an ontological command, a natural law injected directly into the fabric of space.
The air across the entire deck became thick, solid as liquid lead. Gravity within a two-hundred-meter radius multiplied hundreds of times in a fraction of a second.
It was a bloodless massacre.
Two thousand eight hundred soldiers—anyone below the advanced Origin Realm—collapsed immediately. Steel breastplates dented inward. The sound of thousands of femurs, knees, and spines cracking and splintering in unison was deafening. Hundreds of soldiers spat blood and foam, their organs crushed against the deck of their own ship, flattened against the wood by the sheer weight of Samael's aura.
The archers, unable to hold their weapons, fell face-first. Their lightning arrows detonated harmlessly against the ground.
Only the two hundred elites hovering at the peak of the Origin Realm managed to stay on their feet or on one knee, but they trembled uncontrollably, their faces red from the effort of not being turned to pulp, sweating buckets under the oppressive weight of an angry god.
A sect captain, his eyes bloodshot, barely lifted his head and screamed in pure terror:
"It's a Saint! Valois intelligence was wrong! The desert monsters have a Saint!"
A nearby elite, ignoring the pain of his cracking bones, tried to activate a powerful defense array with a hand seal. Purple light shone for an instant, but the energy simply detached from his fingers and was swallowed by the void surrounding Samael. The magic was nullified, as if the universe itself had decided that soldier's physical laws no longer mattered.
With the infantry neutralized, the Morningstar wolf pack was unleashed.
Kael roared, a guttural sound that heated the air, and the immense dark blade of his sword drew an arc of pale white light. The Slash of Doubt ignored the solidity of the enemy shields that stood in its way. Bodies and heavy armor flew through the air, cleanly sliced by Sword Intent.
Eris didn't cut; she erased. Enveloped in her black Fire of Ruin, she spun like a destructive comet. Where her fists or spear impacted, matter didn't burn; it disintegrated, leaving smoking holes in the deck and in the captains trying to stop her.
Torian, the Elder of Steel, walked upright, his grayish body passively deflecting the desperate sword slashes of the survivors. With every movement of his arm, the Edge of Sovereign Rupture separated heads from necks without his sword ever actually touching skin.
Marcus, laughing with a voice of volcanic thunder, swung his immense forge hammer. When the hammer touched enemy pikes or shields, Marcus's Law of Earth petrified the equipment. The Purple Light soldiers' armor instantly became so rigid and heavy they were trapped, immobilized in metal coffins, easy prey for Rowan's arrows or Draven's explosions.
III. Clash of Divinities
But the one-sided slaughter of the soldiers was interrupted by the fury of the heavens.
From the upper balcony of the command bridge, three auras matching the cosmic pressure plummeted, tearing the atmosphere with the force of a contained hurricane.
Great Ancestor Valerius, at the peak of True Saint Stage 3, landed in the center of the deck, twenty meters from Samael. His mere landing caused the dreadnought's reinforced steel superstructure to crack. To his right landed Matriarch Ysabel (Saint Stage 2), a pale, lethal woman wrapped in a cloak of emerald winds and liquid poisons that hissed like hundreds of snakes around her neck. To the left, Mercenary Gorth (Saint Stage 1) shook the deck. He was a gigantic brute covered in thick plates of black steel, wielding a double axe that crackled violently with untamable lightning.
Valerius, with his imposing build and severe face stained with contempt, studied Samael through the sea of his own men's corpses. There was a mix of genuine astonishment and a destructive hunger in his eyes.
"A True Saint Stage 1..." Valerius's voice reverberated with the Law of Pressure, attempting to repel the Patriarch's gravitational aura. "And so young. You have hidden your fangs well, child of the dunes. You managed to fool the Alliance and the Valois. But do not confuse luck with supremacy. There is an immense difference between touching the sky... and owning it."
Samael Morningstar smiled with abyssal coldness.
He reached his gloved hand behind his back.
Slowly, he unsheathed the Odachi of the Ravenous Eclipse.
The instant the steel left the scabbard, the immense curved blade began to devour the sunlight around it. The air seemed to ripple and wither. The ancestral blood running through Samael's veins boiled with the resonance of Supreme Laws, emitting a faint, dark red vapor that enveloped his black armor.
"Your sky is in my way, Valerius," Samael whispered, but his words cut the air like ice blades. "So I'm going to break it."
Samael didn't charge running. He disappeared.
It wasn't a simple movement of speed or a quick step. It was the Law of Space briefly denying his existence at point A to reinstate it at point B. He reappeared instantly a hand's breadth from Valerius's face. The Odachi of the Eclipse descended in a vertical slash carrying the weight of a mountain and the edge of a dimensional tear.
Valerius, whose Stage 3 reflexes were superhuman, raised his right hand at the speed of light, wrapping it in pure stellar fire.
"Law of Pressure: Wall of Atlas."
The air between them solidified instantly into an invisible plane, a conceptual wall designed to withstand the weight of the firmament.
Samael's black sword crashed against the invisible force.
BOOOM!
The collision between Samael's Void and Valerius's Pressure unleashed a brutal spherical shockwave. The deck of the Wrath of Heaven buckled inward. The shattered bodies of soldiers, wood splinters, and armor remnants were blown through the air like shrapnel in an explosion. Valerius's invisible barrier cracked loudly but withstood the initial assault.
Samael did not press on. Using the blade's rebound, he used Dimensional Isolation to step back into the void, effortlessly retreating fifteen meters, landing with the softness of a feather while his breathing remained absolutely calm, unaltered by the clash of titans.
Valerius lowered his hand, feeling a slight numbness in his fingers. The contempt in his eyes had been replaced by pure martial alertness. The monster of the desert hit much harder than a Stage 1.
Samael, Odachi pointing at the ground, did not look away from Valerius, but his command resonated clearly across the shattered deck.
"Malak. Livia. Isolate the poison one," the Patriarch ordered.
The shadows swirled. Malak and his hundred specters instantly surrounded Matriarch Ysabel, ready for Absolute Darkness to suffocate her poisonous winds. The Elder of Life, Livia, positioned herself to purge any toxin that escaped the veil.
"Lilith. Seraphina. Take care of the puppet and dismantle the steel," Samael added.
The temperature plummeted as the Ice Empress and the Deity of Ash advanced toward the giant Gorth. Behind them, Ancestor Valois's massive Saint Grade Puppet roared, its bandages ready to receive the mercenary's electrical strikes.
Samael looked back at Valerius. The Dragon pupils glowed with violet and crimson light. The true battles of the Saints were about to begin.