Chapter 99: Clash of Divinities (Part 2)
The deck of the enemy dreadnought had become a disorganized killing field. Samael's initial pressure had neutralized the infantry, leaving only the scattered and terrified elites of the Purple Light Sect. And upon those survivors, the Golden Generation descended like a biblical plague.
Kael Morningstar didn't run; he flowed through the enemy formation. His dark sword traced lethal arcs, executing clean decapitations with the mathematical precision of his new Sword Heart.
An enemy commander, clad in earth dragon scale armor, tried to block Violeta with a massive tower shield. The young Morningstar didn't stop. Dimensional phase. Violeta used the [Step Between Worlds]; her body blurred and physically passed through the solid steel shield as if it were mist, plunging her claws directly into the man's heart before materializing again with a sharp clack like striking stones.
In the distance, Eris's hysterical laughter echoed as her spear burned with black fire, disintegrating three Stage 9 experts who tried to ambush her. Cedric, using only one arm, painted lethal runic seals in the air, detonating the energy cores of the starboard cannons to paralyze the ship. The Twenty Pillars weren't fighting a symmetrical war; they were cleansing a plague.
But the true conceptual cataclysm was happening in the center of the deck, where the deities crossed weapons.
The gigantic Mercenary Gorth, clad in plates of black steel and wielding a double axe spitting untamable lightning, glared at his three opponents. Standing ten meters away from him were Seraphina, Lilith, and the colossal Dune Assassin Puppet.
"Two pale witches and a sand doll to stop me?" Gorth let out a hoarse laugh, his voice amplified by lightning energy, confident in his True Saint Stage 1 strength. "I am steel and storm. I'm going to split that puppet in two, and then I'm going to turn you women to dust."
Gorth stomped, splintering the metal floor. His body became a human projectile. He lunged forward at an absurd speed for a man his size, raising the lightning axe to deliver a downward strike capable of splitting the dreadnought in half.
But the puppet wasn't a sand doll. And Seraphina wasn't a simple witch.
The Ice Empress didn't even blink. Her deep blue eyes, crossed by that glowing silver ring, watched the colossus's trajectory.
The unstable Proto-Law, Static Absolute Zero, claimed its territory.
Gorth entered Seraphina's twenty-meter radius.
The air in front of the mercenary visually thickened, filling with a shimmering silver mist that looked like crushed lotus dust. Gorth felt as if he had just slammed into a wall of frozen ocean water.
Karmic Friction seized his muscles. His True Saint speed plummeted by ninety percent. His gigantic arms, once a deadly blur, began to move in slow motion, as if he were trying to swing the axe submerged in heavy, freezing gelatin.
"What... kind... of magic... is this?" Gorth roared, the words dragging in his throat as he fought the density of space.
But it wasn't magic. It was the Frost of Subjugation.
Seraphina's will crushed the warrior's pride. The extreme cold didn't attack his steel skin; it attacked his spinal cord directly. Gorth felt a primal terror, a conceptual gravitational pressure that buckled his knees, forcing him to hunch painfully as the silver mist crystallized the Qi around him, leaving him with no external energy to feed on.
And while the True Saint struggled to stay upright in that stopped time, the Dune Assassin Puppet struck.
The giant of bandages and bone crashed into the slowed-down Gorth like a derailed train. The puppet's gigantic bone hook sank into the black steel plates of the mercenary's chest, lifting him off the ground and throwing him thirty meters backward.
Gorth smashed brutally into one of the ship's steel masts, denting it deeply. He spat blood, surprise and pain shattering his confidence. He managed to stand up, but Seraphina's black ice had already weakened the structure of his armor. His plates had become as fragile as cheap glass.
"You wretches!" Gorth roared, unleashing a shockwave of lightning that swept across the deck, aiming to fry them alive.
In that moment, Lilith acted.
The Great Elder, surrounded by the thick smoke of her Shroud of the Eternal Pyre, looked like the incarnation of judgment day. Her eyes, like red embers, glowed in the darkness of the ash.
Gorth launched a massive arc of lightning toward them.
Lilith didn't dodge it. She raised her own weapon, ready to unleash the terror of the Phoenix.
[Spear of the Sky-Piercing Phoenix: Feathers of Deaf Incineration].
The Great Elder waved the air, and dozens of feathers forged from compact ash and grayish embers detached from her shroud. The feathers didn't explode against Gorth's lightning; they passed right through it, ignoring the electromagnetic flow, and flew straight toward the mercenary.
Gorth blocked some with the handle of his axe, but five others managed to lodge themselves in the frozen cracks of his steel armor.
The ash feathers didn't detonate. They anchored into his flesh and began to burn inward.
The mercenary let out a guttural shriek. The suffocating, flameless heat consumed the Qi inside his own meridians to stay lit, weakening his internal defense and carbonizing his muscles without spilling a drop of blood. The area around each wound immediately turned grayish and dry, like rotten wood.
Desperate, Gorth channeled all his Stage 1 strength into his legs, trying to escape Seraphina's subjugation radius and get away from the ash devouring him from within. He lunged to the side, raising the axe for a flank assault at lightning speed.
But space itself turned against him.
Seraphina's Qi had shifted from a standard icy blue to a pale cyan with streaks of silver and black. Her face showed no effort, only the lethal indifference of a true empress.
[Blue Jade Manual: Waltz of the Lunar Frost].
Seraphina moved with an elegance that defied the slaughter surrounding her. She skated on the air itself, letting frost bloom with every step in lotus patterns. Her speed increased obscenely, while the aura of the Lunar Shroud passively drained what little stamina the slowed-down mercenary had left.
Gorth launched a desperate slash at Seraphina. The lightning axe cleaved the Empress's figure in half.
But there was no blood. The figure "flaked" away.
It was a Reflection of the Moon in Ice.
Gorth had struck a solid copy of dark, translucent ice. Upon impact, the image silently imploded. An expanding cloud of frost needles drove into the mercenary's arms and chest. The layer of instantaneous black ice immobilized his ribcage and froze the nerve endings in his arms, rendering him unable to swing the heavy axe.
Trapped, carbonizing on the inside thanks to Lilith's ash and frozen on the outside by Seraphina's trap, the True Saint was a doomed statue.
Seraphina reappeared in his blind spot, the silver ring in her eyes glowing with homicidal coldness. She raised a slender jade sword.
[Slash of the Frigid Midnight].
The slash traced a crescent of liquid silver light in the air. There was no noise of metal. The cold crystal arc passed through the giant mercenary's neck.
The cut wasn't bloody, nor did it dismember the body. Upon contact with Seraphina's sword, the steel of Gorth's armor and the living flesh of his neck turned porcelain white. Magnificent and terrible frost flowers immediately grew from the wound throughout his entire nervous system, expanding at breakneck speed. His heart collapsed; his lungs solidified; the blood in his veins turned to solid ice.
Gorth, the True Saint of the Storm, was petrified in an eternal pose of mute agony, a grotesque crystal statue in the middle of the war.
Lilith, manifesting next to the statue via the Dust Bird Stride, materializing from a cloud of ash at ground level, touched the mercenary's crystallized shoulder.
"The ash claims the ice," murmured the Great Elder, passively activating her entropy.
Gorth's frozen statue simply crumbled. Hundreds of kilos of flesh, bone, and steel fell to the ground converted into a fine grayish dust and crushed ice that the wind instantly swept away. An enemy Saint had been erased without leaving a corpse.
Seraphina nodded slightly to Lilith, both of their breathing slightly ragged from the effort of forcing their abilities against a higher-ranking opponent.
And as the mercenary's dust scattered across the deck, an explosion of emerald wind and poison erupted at the other end of the ship, announcing that Malak had trapped his prey in absolute darkness.
Chapter 99: Clash of Divinities (Part 3)
The deck of the enemy dreadnought had become a disorganized killing field. Samael's initial pressure had neutralized the infantry, leaving only the scattered and terrified elites of the Purple Light Sect. And upon those survivors, the Golden Generation descended like a biblical plague.
Kael Morningstar didn't run; he flowed through the enemy formation. The heavy blade of Whisper of the North traced lethal arcs, executing clean decapitations with the mathematical precision of his new Sword Heart.
An enemy commander, clad in earth dragon scale armor, tried to block Violeta's advance with a massive tower shield. The young Morningstar didn't stop. Dimensional phase. Violeta used the [Step Between Worlds]; her body became a blurred image of three overlapping echoes and physically passed through the solid steel shield as if it were made of static. Materializing behind the commander with the sharp clack of two stones striking, her void-covered claws ripped his heart out before the man realized his block had failed.
In the distance, Eris's hysterical laughter echoed as her spear burned with black ruin fire, disintegrating three Stage 9 experts who tried to flank her. Cedric, operating with a single hand and frigid efficiency, painted lethal runic seals in the air, detonating the energy cores of the starboard cannons to paralyze the ship's defensive systems.
Xylia fell from the rigging like incarnate lightning, frying the meridians of any soldier attempting to summon magic. Elara, Elowen, Lyra, and the rest of the first Sequences moved in formations of three, ensuring no enemy elite managed to launch a distress signal. The twenty prodigies weren't fighting a symmetrical war; they were cleansing an infestation.
But while the youth massacred the mortals, the true tactical combat unfolded on the port side, where the shadows faced the tempest.
Matriarch Ysabel, a True Saint Stage 2, floated half a meter above the bloodied deck. Her beautiful but lethal face was framed by a cloak of emerald winds and poisonous miasmas. A gigantic serpent forged of liquid toxins hissed around her neck.
Around her, Malak, the Sovereign of the Scythe (Saint Stage 1), and the hundred Silent Shadows had already deployed the [Veil of the Eclipse].
The liquid darkness swallowed the sunlight in that corner of the ship. Space solidified, isolating the area. Ysabel felt the immediate disconnection with the external ambient Qi, but, as a True Saint Stage 2, her own internal reserves were an ocean.
"Pathetic parlor tricks," Ysabel hissed. Her voice was a poisonous whistle. "You think a simple smokescreen can suffocate the hurricane?"
Ysabel raised her hands. Her aura erupted, green and deadly. A cyclone of toxic wind and pressurized air blades expanded from her body, attempting to shred Malak's darkness and the specters hiding within it.
The poisonous hurricane was too dense and fast for the specters to dodge. Three of the Silent Shadows were hit; their incorporeal bodies boiled from the acid wind and dissipated with a muffled scream.
But Malak was not alone. The Shadows were only the blade; the Council was the shield.
Before Ysabel's toxic cyclone could expand more than ten meters, the steel floor in front of the Matriarch tore open.
[Emerald Root Prison].
Livia, the Elder of Life, drove her hands into the ship's deck from outside the Veil. Jade wood roots, hard as steel, instantly sprouted beneath Ysabel's feet. The roots didn't seek to physically trap her, but acted as Qi siphons. They crashed into the base of the venomous cyclone.
Even though Livia was only Half-Saint Stage 2 and her roots quickly began to wither under the corrosive toxicity of a Saint Stage 2, the contact fulfilled its purpose. The roots drained a critical fraction of the cyclone's energy, sending that vitality to Malak to reinforce the integrity of the Veil of the Eclipse.
Ysabel grunted in annoyance, and with a wave of her hand, the wind serpent decapitated Livia's roots.
"Wood against wind? Idiocy."
The enemy Matriarch condensed her poison into hundreds of hyper-compressed liquid darts and fired them in all directions into the darkness, seeking to impale anything alive.
In that instant, Sela intervened.
Gliding through the Veil of the Eclipse using the [Silent Void Stride], the Third Elder lost her three-dimensionality, dodging dozens of darts that passed through her without causing harm. Sela emerged from the shadow of a shattered mast and raised both hands.
[Mirror of Liquid Penumbra].
A two-dimensional sheet of darkness, matte black and viscous, materialized in front of her. Dozens of Ysabel's poisonous darts struck the mirror. They didn't splash; the shadow "omitted" their kinetic and chemical force, sinking them into flat space.
Sela couldn't return an attack from a True Saint Stage 2 without her mirror breaking, but she could redirect it. The penumbra sheet rippled, and with a hiss, it "spat" the poisonous darts harmlessly toward the ceiling, absorbing much of the area assault.
Ysabel, furious to see her attacks mitigated by lower-ranking experts, fixed her sight on Sela.
"Die, elusive insect!" Ysabel lunged forward, her hand forming a claw wrapped in a corrosive hurricane, ready to rip Sela's heart out.
Sela didn't try to flee. The weight of using her shadow laws was dizzying her, causing a temporary loss of sensory identity. She went rigid.
But before Ysabel's claw could reach Sela, an unmovable, grayish body interposed itself in her path.
Torian, the Elder of Steel.
The Weapon Master didn't unsheathe. He simply crossed his arms in front of his chest, activating his Semi-Law of Density.
[Physical Rejection].
Ysabel's hurricane claw slammed squarely into Torian's forearms. The steel of his body shrieked under the pressure of the True Saint. Ysabel's corrosive wind tried to shred his molecular structure.
Torian was pushed five meters backward, his boots ripping steel plates from the deck. He coughed up a clot of dark blood, the difference in stages becoming evident, but his body didn't break. His Semi-Law forced reality to reject deep penetration; it dispersed Ysabel's enormous force throughout his entire structure, preventing his arms from being ripped off.
Torian's sacrifice and Sela's defense created the perfect tactical opening. The "false front" had distracted Ysabel from the true threat.
In the exact millisecond Ysabel's claw bounced off Torian's arms, Malak appeared.
There was no sound of footsteps. There was no air fluctuation. The Sovereign of the Scythe materialized directly from the shadow cast by Ysabel herself.
His incredibly pale hand, devoid of any vital warmth, reached out into the chaos of the hurricane and gently touched the enemy Matriarch's back, right between her shoulder blades.
[Touch of the Grave's Chill].
Ysabel let out an agonized gasp. Her eyes widened massively.
She felt an injection of pure death invade her meridians at point-blank range. The poisonous hurricane surrounding her began to weaken immediately. Her blood, once a burning torrent of power, turned to black ice. Her True Saint movements slowed, cadaveric rigidity seizing her muscles and joints for a deadly second.
With his target frozen from the inside, Malak took a sidestep, his figure merging back into the blackness of the Veil of the Eclipse.
He spun his massive black scythe. The blade glowed with a sinister will-o'-the-wisp.
"Storms eventually die, Matriarch," whispered Malak's voice, resonating from all directions in the darkness.
Malak launched the slash.
[Severing of the Silver Thread].
The immense curved blade didn't seek to decapitate Ysabel's physical body. The scythe passed a few inches from her neck, but the blade cut space itself, aiming for the fragile, invisible spiritual thread connecting the Matriarch's soul to her flesh.
Ysabel, still fighting the black ice in her veins, felt the conceptual impact.
Her soul was violently separated from her core for an instant. She let out a piercing scream—not of physical pain, but of existential terror. Her True Saint Stage 2 cultivation became incredibly unstable; she instantly lost control over her wind and poisons. The hurricane protecting her collapsed into a harmless breeze.
She was exposed. Weakened. Her soul paralyzed.
Malak emerged from the darkness, floating in front of her. The gigantic spectral iron doors of the underworld began to manifest behind him, ready for the final execution.
But Ysabel wasn't the only enemy deity on the deck. And the Patriarch's battle was about to overflow.