Chapter 168: The Collapse of Laws - Part 1
The air in the immense obsidian coliseum ceased to be a breathable gas. The instant the legion's auras erupted, the atmosphere transmuted into a suffocating, thick soup of pure kinetic, magical, and biological pressure.
The simultaneous charge of forty-five primordial monsters, all burning at the peak of their Semi-Transformation, was not a simple coordinated attack; it was a true tectonic cataclysm. The mass and energy released threatened to tear the very seams of the "Realm of the Eternal Dawn".
At the head of the monstrous vanguard, the head-on collision was inescapable.
Samael Morningstar, enveloped in the immaculate gloom of his Imperial Void Dragon Armor, did not retreat a single millimeter. His deep draconic eyes, tinged with a crimson violet, narrowed beneath the majestic dark halo of the Crown of the Primordial Sovereign. The Demon King was not going to insult them by using evasive teleportation to dodge this first clash. If they wanted to measure pure physical strength against him, the Progenitor would impart a painful lesson on what cosmic mass meant.
Borg, transformed into the unstoppable Bronze Battering Ram, lowered his head. All his boiling Qi projected a meter in front of him, materializing into a spectral bronze battering ram that completely nullified the laws of friction and air resistance. He carried in his hands the Black Iron Bonebreaker Mace, an immense mass of metal forged in the depths that absorbed light. Upon channeling his power, the hammer unnaturally multiplied its weight, descending with the crushing inertia of a moving mountain, while the primordial horn of living metal on his forehead tore through the void.
On his right side, Bren, the Behemoth, stepped with a seismic resonance that liquefied the obsidian crystal beneath his heavy boots. His hypertrophied muscles pumped burning magma towards his forearms. In his hands, the Volcanic Vajra shone with a blinding red. The crystallized magma core on the back of his gauntlets throbbed like a furious heart, converting his physical strength into high-frequency shockwaves designed to bypass any external armor and turn internal organs into liquid pulp.
Samael clenched his left fist unhurriedly.
The void crystal embedded in his gauntlet instantly absorbed the light of the coliseum, condensing the crushing Law of Space in his knuckles until reaching the conceptual weight of a collapsing star.
The Patriarch threw a frontal punch, clean and devoid of technique, directly against the combined charge.
The impact between Samael's bare fist, Borg's immense black iron mace, and Bren's magmatic vajra produced a dull and devastating roar that shattered the eardrums of anyone not covered by dragon scales. The shockwave was so densely absurd that the oxygen within a hundred-meter radius liquefied instantly, creating a ring of white condensation that swept the arena.
Samael's cosmic force stopped the ram's unstoppable charge dead in its tracks.
The ground beneath them could not withstand the physical paradox and cracked violently, sinking reality into a crater half a kilometer in diameter. Borg spat out a mouthful of molten bronze blood, his thick metallic knees creaking and threatening to give way under the weight of a mini-world contained in his father's arm. Bren's fists repeatedly struck the ribs of Samael's dark armor, injecting deadly seismic vibrations that the Patriarch's spatial dermis simply swallowed as if they were simple summer breezes.
But the clan's vanguard was not alone. They no longer fought as individuals seeking glory; they operated like the gears of a perfectly oiled killing machine.
Behind Borg and Bren's agony, the unbreakable wall acted without hesitation. Tormund, the Wall of Flesh, sank his heavy basalt boots into the obsidian. Activating his earthly intent, he became one with the planetary crust. He distributed the apocalyptic damage of Samael's impact across kilometers of earth beneath his feet, acting as the ultimate anchor that prevented the coliseum's tectonic plate from disintegrating from the collision.
Simultaneously, Goran and Magnus took a step forward, the earth groaning beneath their density. Goran pressed his broad hands of divine alloy against Borg and Bren's backs.
"NOW!" roared the Bronze Shield.
Goran's impenetrable scales shone with fury as they absorbed the immense, cosmic, and repulsive kinetic energy of Samael's punch that was tearing the vanguard apart. Acting as a biological channeler, Goran pumped that ocean of force directly into Magnus's Liquid Vajra Skeleton.
Magnus crossed his arms. His bloodline dictated that his mass was superior to his surroundings. He created a dome of heavy gravity around himself, compressing the stolen energy. Turned into a conductor of absolute inertia, Magnus did not make the mistake of attacking the Sovereign head-on. Instead, he spun on his own axis, lifting chunks of the floor, and redirected that incalculable seismic energy towards the flanks, injecting it like a beam of pure brute force directly into Kael and Eris's tense bodies.
Empowered by the physical force stolen from their own Patriarch, the Sword King and the Ruin Berserker burst out to the sides at the speed of light, flanking Samael in a perfect pincer.
From the left, Kael descended like the final judgment. His Magma Fang no longer had a physical form; it was a hyper-dense blade of incandescent plasma. His Crimson Dragon bloodline generated an atomic friction so high that space itself began to evaporate in his wake, consuming all the oxygen within a five-kilometer radius and plunging the area into an icy gloom. Behind the redhead, the immense illusory silhouette of a six-armed Infernal King was projected, imitating his posture. Delivering the downward slash, Kael did not unleash fire; he unleashed a vertical column of golden and black plasma that fell from the sky and rose from the ground simultaneously. The terrain in his path didn't burn, it vitrified instantly, freezing the ashes in the air as if time had died.
From the right, Eris unleashed true terror. Her black and white flames, designed to break the molecular bonds of reality, swirled around her long spear, the Sun Devourer. Eris spun the weapon forged from collapsed star iron, creating a vortex that sucked all the heat from the room. Thrusting the tip toward the Patriarch, the energy did not explode outwards; it unleashed a shockwave of dark matter. A blinding white flash lasted a millisecond before a sphere of absolute, devouring darkness expanded rapidly, black lightning destroying the very fabric of existence in search of the god's armor.
Samael recognized the exquisite kinetic trap immediately. They had used his own strength to empower the two most lethal destructive laws in his army. If that space-melting plasma and those matter-devouring flames touched him with such density, even he would suffer injuries.
Seeing the boys' immense power, feeling how space was torn by Eris's spear and melted by Kael's sword, the Sovereign half-smiled. A paternal pride, dark and twisted, shone in his gaze.
"Ingenious," Samael whispered.
Without needing to move his feet or raise his sword, Samael released his absolute defense.
A layer of the purest, most devouring nothingness expanded from his dark armor. It wasn't a shield that clashed against attacks; it was the very nullification of concepts. Kael's atomic heat and golden plasma, along with Eris's sphere of absolute darkness and black lightning, crashed against the Veil of the Void.
There was no explosion. There was no tremor.
They simply ceased to exist. The temperature of a dwarf sun, the molecular destruction, the inertia... everything was erased from reality a millimeter before touching the cold black metal of Samael's armor.
But the Empire's onslaught did not stop there. They knew the Veil of the Void required concentration. Using the erasure of their own attacks as a visual screen, the second kamikaze wave launched itself into the abyss.
Ignis crossed the sky like a missile, willingly immolating himself by compressing all his fire into a sphere the size of a marble. He impacted against the veil in absolute silence, his White Sun Singularity detonating implosively to draw the nothingness toward the center and destabilize it.
Behind the fire youth's explosion, Voltar appeared in a violet blink. His heavy metallic cobalt gauntlets hummed. He had compressed all the lightning of his Tribulation bloodline into a single point on his knuckles. The plasma was so dense that light bent around it. Voltar connected his fist directly against the invisible barrier, injecting hundreds of gigawatts of pure electricity inwards, trying to collapse the Patriarch's organs under the weight of thunder.
Simultaneously, Korg crossed his smelting claws at two thousand degrees Celsius over Samael's chest, seeking to tear off the Veil. Maren, having completely renounced his physical body, became an incessant lightning bolt, bouncing against the Patriarch's armor hundreds of times per second, disintegrating his own electrons to overload reality itself.
At the epicenter of the apocalypse, surrounded by implosive fire, celestial lightning, and fusion claws, Samael widened his maniacal smile. Close-quarters combat against these immortal beasts feeding off his own strength was intoxicating.
"I like it. Keep it up," Samael's voice sounded amused, resonating directly in their skulls. "Let's dance, little dragons! HAHAHAHA."
In that instant of frenzy, the dark golden halo above Samael's head lit up. The Crown of the Primordial Sovereign activated automatically.
For Samael's mind, the universe froze. The roar of Voltar's lightning and Ignis's explosions fell silent. Processing trillions of variables per second, the Patriarch not only predicted the next combined assault but also saw his enemies' Qi conductive threads like exposed wires in the dark. He knew that, if he kept absorbing attacks, the pressure would eventually give way.
Samael decided to change the rules. He combined the tyranny of his spatial domain with the absolute erasure of the void.
The Patriarch's body blinked and disappeared from the center of the massacre. He left no sound wave, no displacement of air, not the slightest fluctuation of Qi. He walked through the microscopic cracks between dimensions. His target was not the resilient vanguard; it was the tactical rearguard. He had to annihilate the healing and calculating pillars that kept these berserkers operating with perfection.
He appeared a hundred meters away in a flat instant. He materialized directly behind Lys, Elowen, and Cassius. Kurohime, thirsty and vibrating with a red aura, was already raised and ready to decapitate the three support pillars in a single diagonal slash that would split the coliseum.
But the clan's tactical brains were one step ahead of their god's arrogance.
In the exact millisecond that Samael's Law of Space began to curve the air behind them, Iris's Fractal Amber eyes spun frantically, breaking down the layers of reality. She saw the source code of the spatial jump.
"Coordinate Z-7, Rear Axis!" Iris transmitted through the Nexus's telepathic network. Her runic crystal fingers tapped frantically at the air, pushing her own mind to the absolute limit to process the Patriarch's exact exit point before he materialized.
Lys, Elowen, and Cassius did not have the physical time or the speed to dodge the lethal black blade already falling upon their necks. But Cedric didn't need them to move.
The Emperor of Seals, kneeling in the geometric center of the three, slammed his immense Matrix-Breaker gauntlets against the floor. His metallic scales shone with divine light. The block of Stellar Jade floating in front of him, his architectural chessboard, lit up, projecting thousands of golden threads of light.
An immense Temple of Living Metal intercepted reality.
The pure obsidian of the floor was instantly transmuted. Colossal walls of divine steel, hastily engraved with runes of stabilization, gravitational stabilization, and absolute repulsion, erupted from the ground like a titan's teeth, encapsulating Lys, Elowen, and Cassius in an impregnable, closed lotus-shaped fortress, just one millimeter below Kurohime's edge.
Samael emerged from his spatial jump with the sword descending with lethal force.
The majestic Kurohime clashed violently against the reinforced runic barrier. A burst of golden and black sparks illuminated the dark dimension. Samael narrowed his eyes. The wall was not only forged in divine steel; it was coated by thousands of small, interlaced micro-formations. Individually they were weak, but by combining Iris's immense predictive processing capacity with Cedric's instant transmutation, those thousands of runic networks acted like a living muscle, reaching a defensive density that directly rivaled a Saint Realm shield.
The Patriarch felt his sword's steel bounce slightly. A genuine twinge of surprise, quickly eclipsed by immense pride, ran through his chest. The more he pressured them, the more the pups surpassed themselves. They had managed to block a surprise attack of his.
But the game of resistance had a limit.
Samael lowered the sword and raised his left hand toward the runic steel wall. His fingers were enveloped in the black mist of the absolute Void, ready to touch the fortress and disintegrate the metal, the runes, and the three cultivators inside until they became atomic ash.
Just as Samael was about to condense absolute nothingness into his fingers to disintegrate the runic steel wall and the healers inside, a lethal, unnatural, and paradoxical presence locked directly onto the center of his chest.
Three hundred meters away, Varian Morningstar had not yet released his bowstring. And yet, the Patriarch was already bleeding.
Using the astonishing Fixed Destiny Authority of his Hawk Dragon bloodline, Varian had nullified the very concept of "trajectory." His bow, the Hawk's Eye, forged from ivory dragon bone, did not have a physical string; it used the God's Nerve, a filament of golden light that altered space-time. Varian did not aim at his father's body; he connected the string directly to the Sovereign's Qi signature. The exact instant his emerald fingers decided to kill and began to relax the tension, space collapsed. Causality was inverted.
The emerald plasma arrow did not travel through the air. The universe was tricked into registering that the projectile already existed, buried deep within Samael's heart. A meteor shower of green, thousands of hyper-pressurized liquid wind blades, began to detonate from the inside out, threatening to shred the god's organs from his very core.
Samael felt the brutal spatial compression materializing beneath his dark breastplate. Time seemed to stop. The Crown of the Primordial Sovereign processed the lethal temporal paradox in a trillionth of a second.
The Patriarch did not try to dodge; it was physically impossible to dodge the past. Instead, with terrifying calm, he brought his left hand to his own chest and activated Dimensional Exile: The Mirror of Nothingness.
A spatial micro-fold, a two-dimensional, glassy sheet of pure void, opened in the millimeter of space between his pale skin and the inner plate of his armor. The exact millisecond Varian's arrow became physical reality and the plasma tried to expand, it was swallowed by the mirror. The energy was "flattened" and banished forever to an inert limbo where time did not exist.
Samael lowered his hand, emerging completely unscathed from the paradox that would have murdered any Great Saint, but the swarm of anti-aircraft artillery did not give him a single breath.
Taking advantage of his exhalation, Selene fired her Death Whisper Arrow. Her bow, the Zenith of the Cloud's Sigh, synchronized her Qi's frequency with Samael's pulmonary rhythm. The arrow of ethereal pink light nullified molecular friction; it became intangible, traveling undetectably through the oxygen the Patriarch was breathing, ready to materialize in his trachea and expand into needles of wind.
Simultaneously, Sylas pierced reality. His Ethereal Horizon Vortex created a tunnel of absolute vacuum. His Arrow of Inevitable Destiny made no sound as it traveled faster than its own sound, collapsing into multiple dimensional trajectories to drive a Qi-sucking black hole into the back of the Patriarch's neck.
And closing the triangle, Lia. Her Thunder Hawk Eyes shone, ionizing the atmosphere around Samael. With her silver lightning bow, she unleashed the Bolt of Heavenly Judgment. The electrical shot did not seek flesh; it sought to connect with Samael's nerve network, drawn inescapably by the ambient static to cause multiorgan overload paralysis.
Fire, asphyxiation, void, and thunder converged on a single mathematical point.
Samael did not even raise his sword. His obsidian armor reacted to his will, activating the Mantle of Inexistence. The Demon King's figure suddenly became "blurry," like a failing hologram in the rain. Samael phased out of the laws of the physical world.
The pink wind arrows seeking his lungs, the vacuum projectile aiming for his nape, and the lightning seeking his nerves passed through his dark silhouette as if passing through smoke, crashing uselessly against the distant walls of the labyrinth in a symphony of inert destruction.
"It's useless," Samael murmured, materializing completely a second later. He raised Kurohime, preparing to launch a massive area slash that would split the coliseum in half.
But just as he tensed his muscles, a presence slipped behind him, and the very sound of the universe was murdered.
When Samael slightly turned his gaze, he saw Joren's cold silhouette. A spark of genuine surprise and delight crossed the Patriarch's mind: "This boy is losing his presence more and more... it's as if he didn't exist. Good. Hahaha... I want to see how far they can go."
It wasn't that the roar of the battle lowered in volume. Joren had activated his Domain of the Silent Void. A three-hundred-meter radius became an absolute acoustic tomb. The sudden nullification of sound waves caused the fluid in the inner ear to collapse; instantaneous vertigo, accompanied by paralyzing nausea, struck even the Patriarch's divine senses.
In that suffocating, unbearable silence, the phantom executioners attacked from the blind spots.
Joren executed his Nothingness Slit. Using his high-pressure zephyr blood, he propelled himself through an inaudible sonic blink. In his hands, the Absorbent Void Daggers—two two-dimensional black blurs—slashed toward Samael's throat. The Banshee's Scream Stone on his hilt emitted infrasound that twisted visual gravity, while the blades sucked the defensive Qi from the armor.
Beside him, Ciro, the Hurricane Specter, eliminated air resistance. With his Cloud Walker Boots, he broke the laws of inertia. He executed the Zero Wind Lunge. Drawing his twin void swords, his body traveled at pure, infinite speed, materializing in front of Samael the exact millisecond he thought of the attack, leaving only a trail of purple ionized air.
From below, Violeta forced her Ethereal Blood Passage. Becoming completely intangible, she swam through the obsidian floor and emerged directly beneath the Patriarch's chin. Her heterochromatic eyes tracked the fissures of space. In an imperceptible movement, she unleashed the Absolute Zero Lotus. Her needle didn't push matter; it multiplied into twelve dimensional thrusts that sprouted from nothingness, forming a beautiful cyan crystal lotus designed to halt Samael's atoms in an eternal stasis.
Physically cornered in the silent void, Samael's Crown calculated the impossible trajectories in milliseconds. He was about to use his spatial domain to reverse the damage when reality itself warped under a terrifying assault. Terror invaded the space.
Lyra, waiting for Iris's perfect calculation, activated her Materialization of Delirium. She rang her Requiem Bell; the waves broke the cohesion of the physical world, and with a twirl of her Eternal Mist Staff, she unleashed the Symphony of the Broken Horizon. The air fractured like a giant mirror, and thousands of shards of solid, cutting sound flew toward Samael. Worse still, Lyra injected pain directly into his brain: if the illusion managed to make Samael believe he was being cut, his own psyche would tear his flesh.
Simultaneously, Darius unleashed the Execution of the Inverted Board. The sclera of his eyes turned an oily black, and his red pupils spun erratically as he used the cursed text of the Nightmare Demon Eyes. A beam of black static tried to penetrate Samael's Sea of Consciousness, seeking to extract his deepest traumas and force him to die from a massive psychosomatic shock. Illusions of death, pain, and ghosts of the past rushed the god's mind.
The tactic was impeccable. It was the pinnacle of teamwork: nullify balance, distort perception, attack sanity, and execute the physical body with blows that ignored matter. Any other being in existence would have died a thousand times in that instant.
But Samael was not just any being. His bloodline dictated that his will was law.
Twenty percent of his Primordial Dragon blood boiled in his divine veins. The supreme passive of his heritage, the Reverse Scale, activated with the force of a rising sun. Absolute immunity to mental attacks crushed the invasion.
Lyra's psychic assault and Darius's fear virus crashed against an unbreakable obsidian wall of will, shattering like cheap glass. Samael didn't even blink at the attempt to drive him mad.
Spinning on himself with a monstrous anatomical fluidity that dodged Joren's blades by a millimeter, the Patriarch extended two fingers toward the void. He was going to use a law that was still incomplete, one that caused existential fatigue, but the pride and thrill of combat demanded he not limit himself.
"Law of Incomplete Reality: Real Coordinate Fixation."
Reality groaned and submitted painfully. Samael didn't use physical force; he simply dictated with absolute authority that Ciro and Violeta's bodies belonged to the crystal tiles beneath his feet.
Violeta's perfect intangibility and Ciro's zero friction were brutally nullified by a higher conceptual hierarchy. As if gravity had been multiplied by ten thousand, both supreme assassins were sucked down and smashed against the hard floor, immobilized, unable to lift a single finger, like insects crushed under a titan's boot.
Samael raised Kurohime. The colossal black blade vibrated, purring anxiously to drink the immobilized royal blood.
"Event Horizon Thrust," the monarch whispered.
The dark blade elongated across the dimension. A micro-black hole, a sphere of infinite gravity and absolute darkness, formed at the very tip of the steel, descending like inescapable judgment directly toward Ciro and Violeta's exposed foreheads.
CRRAAAACK!
The apocalyptic impact shook the floating mountain to its roots.
But the assassins' heads were not pierced by the singularity. Just in the millisecond prior to annihilation, a golden, fractal matrix shone on the ground: another masterpiece of Iris's perfect predictive synchronization and Cedric's architecture.
Using the temporal matrix as a hyper-short distance teleportation anchor, the Empire's heaviest defensive line materialized out of nowhere, interposing themselves between the scythe of death and their siblings.
Draven blocked the visual horizon with his massive body of icy gigantism. He planted his immense Glacier Scale in the ground and activated the Frozen Horizon Prison. His Absolute Zero Inertia stopped time and molecular movement in the air, densifying the atmosphere until it became a solid block of stasis.
Beside him, Altair crossed his arms, activating his Ash Anvil Veil. His dark gauntlets, the Void's Embrace, anchored to space itself, while his Dead Black Scales of primordial carbon furiously absorbed the massive entropy and kinetic energy of Samael's sword.
The clash was titanic. Draven's unbreakable glacial diamond shield groaned and cracked; the colossus's divine steel bones creaked agonizingly under the pressure of the black hole. Altair spat a thick cloud of blood and ash as his lungs burned from the entropic overload. Their immovable bodies were violently pushed backward, dragging their feet and opening deep furrows in the obsidian.
But they achieved the impossible. Their brutal synergy deflected Kurohime's lethal tip just enough centimeters for the black hole to pierce the ground and not flesh, allowing Ciro and Violeta to roll desperately out of the kill zone.
They had reacted late to the Patriarch's overwhelming offensive, but blind faith in the clan's tanks had saved the assassins' heads.
Samael frowned.
The Demon King observed the exhausted, bleeding giants in front of him. They were becoming painfully, annoyingly, and dangerously efficient at keeping their allies alive. His killer instinct demanded he raise the level of punishment to break that defense.
However, before Samael could even raise his immense sword again, the entire coliseum seemed to rise against him. The forty-five shadows, which a second ago operated in separate assault, support, and sniper squads, changed tactics. They abandoned prudence. They abandoned the rearguards.
They converged in unison, launching themselves at him like a furious swarm of biological calamities.