Chapter 175: The Descent of the Herald and the Countdown of Death
The echo of the Morningstar Empire's unison roar still vibrated against the obsidian slabs of the Great Plaza of the Eternal Dawn. The war machine had been revealed, structured, and sharpened. A bloodlust so dense it could almost be tasted hung in the air.
Samael Morningstar, standing at the peak of the quartz staircase, observed his legion. His crimson-violet eyes lingered on Lilith, the Supreme Commander, and the forty-five monsters that made up his vanguard. They had survived the Infinite Mirror Labyrinth, but the outer world was ancient, treacherous, and ruled by false gods who had spent millennia devouring the weak. It was time to change the rules.
The Patriarch raised his right hand. Space itself seemed to shrink around his fingers as a pearl-sized sphere began to condense in his palm. It wasn't light, nor was it fire; it was a fragment of pure void, swirling with crimson lightning and an overwhelming pressure that caused the thirty thousand Magic Cyborgs of the Dead Blood Guard to recoil a millimeter out of pure survival instinct.
Samael clenched his fist, and the sphere solidified into a dark crystal, pulsing like the heart of a primordial dragon. With a fluid motion, he tossed the crystal toward Lilith.
The woman with fire-red hair caught it in midair, feeling the entropic heat of her own ash being smothered by the lethal immensity residing within that small gem.
"An Avatar of my Authority," Samael said, his voice piercing the absolute silence of the plaza. "It contains a single attack with my current maximum strength. The unadulterated power of a Saint King. It is not a war trophy, Lilith. It is life insurance."
Samael narrowed his eyes, recalling the historical records of the continent. "The Fallen Saint's Tomb in the Broken Mountain Range is not a simple mausoleum. It is a Secret Realm that has been sealed for millennia for a reason the orthodox scum ignores. Use it only if annihilation is imminent."
Lilith tucked the crystal into the folds of her scarlet tunic and struck her chest with a clenched fist. "Your will shall be the only law in that mountain range, Patriarch."
Samael nodded slowly. Suddenly, the air in the Realm of the Eternal Dawn became infinitely heavy. A golden and violet vibration emanated from the Sovereign's body, expanding like an invisible shockwave that swept over the Forty-Five Sequences, the Cyborgs, the Elders, and the Silent Shadows.
The Patriarch had just activated the [Origin Scripture: The Throne of the War Gods].
Kael felt any subconscious trace of doubt or nervousness in his mind completely erased. Dante, whose gray eyes were always calculating risks, felt his mind sharpen into a perfect crystal. Fear ceased to exist for the Morningstar army. The hive mind solidified at once; they were no longer individuals marching to war, they were the fingers of the Sovereign's hand.
And in exchange, invisible threads of karma and destiny anchored themselves to Samael's Dantian. Every life his troops reaped on the outside, every drop of enemy Qi they spilled, would send a 10% tribute of that energy directly to their creator. The Great Harvest had begun.
"Bring the loot. Bring the blood. Let the continent remember what nightmares taste like," Samael ordered.
Without waiting for an answer, the Patriarch turned to the Lotus Throne, where Seraphina awaited him. Their hands intertwined; the heat of Chaos and the absolute zero of the Imperial Lotus clashed and complemented each other in a perfect dance. Together, they walked toward the immense bronze and crystal doors of the Hall of Inheritances.
The plan was set. While the siege force cleansed the orthodox scum, Samael and Seraphina would enter deep seclusion. Thanks to their authority over the mini-world's space-time laws, they would alter the flow within the palace: two years of isolation inside would equal a single year in the outer world.
In front of the colossal shelves containing the laws and wisdom of thousands of ancestor dragons, Samael would open the [Void Heart Sutra]. He would empty his Dantian to absorb the millennial knowledge and forge the "Scripture of the Primordial Dawn," the universal technique that would elevate the clan to divinity.
The heavy doors of the Hall of Inheritances closed with a dull thud, sealing the Sovereign and the Empress.
In the plaza, Lilith Morningstar turned to her legion. Her eyes burned with the fire of a reborn phoenix.
"Vexia, secure the perimeter from the Citadel. Sienna, to the main deck. Sequences, to your deployment positions," Lilith's voice tore through the air like sandpaper. "The rest ends today. Let the Herald of the Void descend!"
Thousands of kilometers away, in the treacherous territory of the outer continent, the Broken Mountain Range rose like a black stone scar against the sky. Legends said that, millennia ago, the heavens fell in this place, splitting the mountains and leaving behind a crater of Dantean proportions. In the exact center of that abyss, immense obsidian doors, covered in red moss and dead runes, marked the entrance to a Secret Realm: the Fallen Saint's Tomb.
Today, the Broken Mountain Range was not a lonely wasteland. It was an anthill of arrogance and greed.
Tens of thousands of cultivators camped around the crater. Golden flags bearing a bloody iron fist flapped in the wind, marking the territory of the imposing Iron Blood Alliance. Beside them, purple banners with silver-embroidered clouds announced the presence of the Violet Cloud Sect, accompanied by the lavish pavilions of half a dozen elite families of the continent.
They had established an iron perimeter three kilometers from the obsidian doors. No one who did not belong to the orthodox factions was even allowed to lay eyes on the crater.
On the edge of the Violet Cloud Sect's camp, an elder in exquisitely embroidered purple robes—a Peak Origin Realm Elder—looked with disdain at a group of independent cultivators. These commoners, covered in dust and blood, had tried to approach to beg for a place in the expedition or to pick up scraps.
"Trash," spat Elder Chen, stroking his pointy beard. "Do you think a Secret Realm of this caliber is open to stray dogs? The treasures of a Saint belong to the domes of heaven. They belong to the Orthodoxy by divine right."
A young independent cultivator, clothes torn and gritting his teeth, dared to raise his voice, driven by desperation.
"The lands of the Broken Mountain Range are neutral! Dark rumors have been circulating for months... they say there is a powerful clan. That they annihilated the powerful Purple Light Sect in a single night. That they erased the Valois family from existence. If those demons arrive..."
Elder Chen let out a laugh so strident that several disciples around him joined the mockery, echoing through the rocky valley.
"Myths of cowards!" roared Chen, raising his hand dismissively. A gigantic claw of purple Qi materialized in the air and crushed the young cultivator against the rocky ground. The sound of breaking ribs drowned out the wind, and the youth spat blood as his Dantian was burst in an instant. "That supposed clan, which rumors say is some 'Morningstar,' is a corpse that has been rotting in some forgotten corner for decades. If they destroyed the Purple Light, they used dirty tricks and suicidal formations. If those heretics dared to poke their heads out here, the Alliance would use them to clean the mud off our boots."
Chen had logical reasons to feel invincible. If one looked toward the sky, floating above the crater on jade lotus platforms, were the true monsters of the alliance. Dozens of Stage 1 and Stage 2 Saints frivolously discussed the division of the loot. Higher up, three Stage 8 Saints radiated a combined aura that distorted the clouds. And at the absolute pinnacle, sitting with his eyes closed on a throne of floating swords, a Great Saint of the Iron Blood Alliance oversaw the operation like an unreachable deity.
With a coalition force like that, what did the ghosts of a fallen family matter?
At the bottom of the crater, the immense obsidian doors emitted a dull creak. The red runes began to pulse with a sickly light. The Secret Realm was about to open. The orthodox disciples drew their weapons, the air saturating with pure greed.
But the creaking of the door was not what made the Great Saint's eyes snap open on his throne of swords.
It was the sky.
It was three in the afternoon, but the sun seemed to suddenly go out. There were no storm clouds, nor a predictable natural eclipse. The light was simply swallowed by an invisible mouth.
Elder Chen looked up, his arrogant smile fading into a grimace of confusion. Space itself above the Broken Mountain Range was folding inward, as if a giant were crumpling the fabric of reality. The air became thick, heavy, and laden with an overwhelming smell of ozone and ancient blood.
The independent cultivators who were still kneeling near the perimeter began to bleed from their noses and ears. Seconds later, the low-level disciples of the Iron Blood Alliance and the Violet Cloud fell face-first to the ground, their bodies crushed against the earth by a gravitational pressure that defied all natural law.
"Defense formations!" shouted one of the Stage 8 Saints in the sky, his voice cracking with sudden panic as he drew a Heaven-Grade artifact.
With a tearing sound that shattered the eardrums of tens of thousands of people, the Herald of the Void burst into the mortal world.
The immense warship of the Morningstar Clan did not sail; it levitated like a mountain of dark blades. Its hull, forged in Black Ice Alloy, absorbed what little light remained in the valley. The immense runes of Divine-Grade matrices engraved on its sides pulsed with a furious crimson-violet glow. The vessel was so colossal that it covered the entirety of the crater, casting a shadow of absolute death over the orthodox expedition.
On the upper deck of the ship, the wind howled like lost souls.
Lilith Morningstar stood at the bow, her scarlet eyes watching the human anthill below with total indifference. To her left and right, the Six Veteran Elders of the clan radiated dense and oppressive auras. And slightly behind, sitting cross-legged on a crystal chair forged from thin air with a steaming cup of tea in her hand, was Sienna. The Maiden of the Mirror looked down in boredom, her bell tinkling softly, ready to erase the enemy Great Saint if he tried to intervene prematurely.
The Great Saint of the Iron Blood Alliance leapt to his feet, his face deathly pale. He swallowed hard, forcing his Qi to the maximum to project his voice through the crushing pressure of the Herald.
"I am Grand Elder Li of the Iron Blood Alliance!" he bellowed, desperately trying to maintain a facade of authority. "This territory has been claimed by the Orthodoxy! Identify yourselves and retreat, or suffer the combined wrath of our...!"
In classic novels and tales of heroes, this was the moment where leaders exchanged insults, measured karma, and debated the right to the treasure.
Lilith Morningstar did not say a single word.
She raised her right hand, covered by an ash gauntlet, and, with a sharp movement, brought it down.
Zero negotiation.
From the edges of the Herald of the Void, forty-five meteors of pure energy erupted toward the earth. The Sequences didn't use flight artifacts or elegant soft-landing formations. They jumped directly into the abyss, enveloped in auras of fire, lightning, gravity, void, and miasma.
The initial impact wasn't a clash of swords; it was pure, ruthless physics.
Borg, the Line Breaker, and Tormund, the Wall of Flesh, didn't draw weapons. They fell like mass extinction asteroids right in the center of the Violet Cloud Sect's main camp. When Tormund's feet touched the ground, his [Basalt Intent] anchored his infinite weight to the earth's crust. The kinetic shockwave was so absurdly brutal that the earth rose like an ocean wave in the middle of a storm.
The Earth-Grade defensive formations that the orthodox had taken days to build exploded into glowing dust. Hundreds of disciples were liquefied inside their own armor, their organs bursting just from the air pressure displaced by the fall of the two physical titans.
Two hundred meters away, Kael Morningstar landed gracefully on the luxurious pavilion of the Iron Blood Alliance. A Stage 1 Saint, desperate at seeing his troops shattered, screamed a frantic order. A sea of three hundred flying swords headed toward Kael like a swarm of lethal steel wasps.
The King of the Sword didn't even unsheathe Magma Fang. His eyes lit up with crimson fire and he activated his [Incandescent Friction Domain].
The air ten meters from Kael warped violently. When the sea of flying swords entered his radius, there was no metallic clash. The Spiritual and Earth-Grade swords simply lost their cohesion. They went from solid metal to incandescent liquid, and then to boiling vapor, before even getting close to the young genius's clothes. The drops of molten metal fell like radioactive rain over the orthodox cultivators themselves, who began to scream agonizingly as their robes and skin caught fire.
In the midst of the chaos, smoke, and carnage, a Stage 2 Saint from an elite family, seeing that those attackers were just youngsters, believed he could decapitate the snake and gain eternal glory. He saw a boy of slender build, with black hair and scarlet tips, walking calmly through the battlefield, looking at the air with dead, gray eyes.
"Die, stupid heretics!" roared the Stage 2 Saint, channeling his entire life's cultivation into a piercing ice spear and launching a treacherous attack at Dante's back.
Dante didn't turn around. His Gray Interface Pupils processed the vibration of the air, the magical density of the ice spear, and the attacker's bone structure in a nanosecond. The Asura Eye traced a thin, glowing red line on the fabric of space itself.
The [Line of Inevitable Death].
Dante moved his dagger, executing the Void Slash. He didn't apply muscular force; he simply slid the dark blade through the geometric fault in reality.
The Stage 2 Saint flew past Dante, landing behind him in a perfect attack stance. For a second, silence seemed to take over that blood-stained corner of the battlefield. The orthodox Saint smiled, fervently believing that his speed had surpassed the young assassin's reflexes.
Then, a thin line of blood appeared in the exact center of the Saint's forehead. The line went down the bridge of his nose, his throat, and his chest, down to his pelvis. His body split into two perfect halves, which fell to the sides with a wet, sickening sound, spilling his entrails onto the rock. The wound was sealed with absolute killing energy; not even the Saint's soul could escape before being disintegrated by the void.
Total combat time: 0.1 seconds.
The orthodox cultivators who witnessed the scene felt their own sanity fracture into pieces. A Stage 2 Saint, a figure of respect and terror on the continent, had just been dismembered by a youth without a visible crossing of weapons. It was a surgical, unnatural, and profoundly profane execution.
Absolute, primitive panic seized the ranks of the alliance. The lines of command collapsed, and the soldiers began shoving each other in a desperate attempt to flee the crater.
In the air, Lilith Morningstar's voice descended from the deck of the Herald of the Void. Amplified by her ash Qi, the voice swept the Broken Mountain Range like the announcement of the end times.
"This Tomb, this crater, and everything that breathes in this mountain range, belongs to the Morningstar Clan."
The silence that followed that statement was so unnaturally heavy that the sound of blood dripping onto the shattered earth seemed deafening. Some veteran orthodox cultivators, upon hearing the cursed name, paled to the point of becoming translucent. The ghosts of the Purple Light Sect and the Valois suddenly ceased to be exaggerated myths to become the tangible nightmare that was dismembering them.
"You have exactly ten seconds to run," Lilith continued, her voice icy and devoid of any trace of human mercy. "At second eleven, anyone still breathing in this perimeter will be considered fertilizer for our garden."
Below, in the hell they had just created, Kael Morningstar raised Magma Fang. Voltar crackled, illuminating the smoke with the purplish lightning of Heavenly Tribulation. Eira froze the heat of the fresh corpses under her feet, and Jareth exhaled a miasma that began to oxidize the steel of fallen weapons with a corrosive hiss.
One.
Two.
The true terror was not in the millennial tomb lying beneath them. The terror had just fallen from the sky, and it had forty-five names.
Nine.
Ten.
The echo of Lilith Morningstar's countdown faded into the cold wind of the Broken Mountain Range. For the thousands of cultivators of the Iron Blood Alliance and the Violet Cloud Sect, that final second was the abyss separating arrogance from annihilation.
In the center of the carnage, standing on the smoking ruins of the orthodox pavilion, Kael Morningstar raised Magma Fang. As the Imperial Rank 1 and the undisputed leader of the Forty-Five Sequences, his presence was an anchor of gravity and fire that dominated the battlefield. His eyes, glowing with the atomic friction of his dragon bloodline, scanned the crater. Through the [Soul Nexus], the hive mind throbbed with a single purpose. Kael didn't need to shout orders; his will flowed to the other forty-four minds in a millisecond.
"Perimeter sweep. Zero prisoners below Saint level. Stage 1 and 2 Saints, break them intact; Vexia needs meat for the cyborgs. Execute."
Kael's mental order unleashed the apocalypse.
On the eastern flank of the immense crater, the initial panic of the Violet Cloud Sect began to morph into the desperate discipline of the cornered. A purple-robed Elder, seeing the frontline collapse, raised his sword to the sky and roared: "Ten Thousand Suffocating Clouds Formation! Link your Dantians! They are just a handful of brats, crush them with the weight of our numbers!"
Ten thousand elite disciples and warriors of the Transcendent and Origin Realm channeled their Qi simultaneously. The sky above them turned a poisonous purple as a massive attack matrix came to life, condensing the energy of ten thousand men into a cloud of spiritual pressure capable of flattening a mountain. They believed, with the blind faith of mortals, that quantity could overcome quality.
Toward that storm of ten thousand men walked Eira, the White Witch.
Her bare feet didn't even touch the bloody earth; she floated a millimeter off the ground, her porcelain skin radiating a cold that didn't belong in this world. She drew no weapons. She wove no hand seals. Her Permafrost Emperor Dragon Bloodline simply imposed its Thermal Void Authority.
"How noisy," Eira whispered.
She didn't project ice. Eira simply sucked out the concept of heat. In a radius of two hundred meters in front of her, the temperature didn't drop gradually; it plummeted instantly to Absolute Zero. The immense purple formation the ten thousand men were creating in the sky stopped dead. The magical energy froze. The air itself turned liquid and then solid, falling to the ground like heavy hail.
The ten thousand cultivators of the Violet Cloud Sect were paralyzed. They weren't encased in blocks of ice; their own bodily fluids, their blood, and the Qi in their meridians had lost all kinetic energy. They were perfect statues, fragile as the finest crystal, with expressions of absolute terror frozen on their faces.
From the sky, Ignis, the Yang Volcanic Dragon, observed his companion's macabre work of art. With a deranged smile, he extended his index finger. On the fingertip, he condensed a White Sun Singularity. It wasn't an expansive fireball; it was a hyper-compressed point of stellar heat, so dense that space warped around it.
Ignis dropped the white light marble exactly into the center of the thermal void created by Eira.
The Annihilation Equation was complete.
The instantaneous clash between the absolute contraction of the permafrost and the infinite expansion of the Yang fire did not generate a fiery explosion. It generated a spatial tear. Reality could not withstand the thermal stress and shattered like a mirror. A silent, blinding wave of void expanded in a half-kilometer radius.
The ten thousand frozen men simply turned into diamond dust. Steel armor, magical shields, flesh, and bones. Everything was erased from existence without a single scream being heard, leaving behind a plain of smooth, crystallized earth.
But the Sequences didn't leave jobs half done. Before the diamond dust touched the ground, Borg, the Line Breaker, emerged from the smoke of battle. His body was engulfed in the Horizon's End Charge. With the inertia of a moving mountain range, Borg charged through the thermal void, his primordial bronze horn shattering the remnants of any defensive matrix that had survived the clash, crushing the Violet Cloud's rearguard camps under his immense living metal boots. His strident laughter was the only sound on the eastern flank.
Meanwhile, on the western flank, the Iron Blood Alliance attempted a different tactic. Three Stage 1 Saint Realm Elders, terrified by the irrational carnage unfolding, grouped together.
"Close the perimeter! Raise the Iron King's Bell!" ordered the leader of the Elders. They planted formation flags in the ground, creating an immense translucent golden dome, an acoustic and spiritual shield designed to isolate the battlefield and repel both physical attacks and mental invasions. They believed themselves safe in their divine bubble.
Vania, the War Siren, walked languidly toward the immense golden dome. Her deep blue hair waved without wind, and the golden runic tattoos on her neck pulsed with an ominous light.
By her side, Voltar, the Walking Storm, cracked his knuckles, his hands heavy with the density of plasma. Behind them, Maren walked dragging his colossal greatsword, his muscles tense with contained brutality.
"Cover your ears," Vania murmured to her companions through the Nexus.
Vania opened her lips. Her Crimson Gold Vocal Cords did not emit a deafening scream; they emitted a mathematically perfect ultrasonic frequency. It was the Authority of Atomic Resonance.
The Saint-grade golden dome, impenetrable to sword strikes and meteors, began to vibrate. The three orthodox Elders inside the shield widened their eyes when they felt their own bones entering the same frequency as the shield.
The dome didn't break; it simply crumbled into glowing dust. In the exact same millisecond, the skeletons of the three orthodox Elders and the hundreds of disciples taking shelter under the barrier disintegrated inside their bodies. They fell to the ground like sacks of flaccid meat, their organs collapsing in on themselves in an unnatural silence.
Voltar didn't waste a second. Seeing the shield had disappeared, he leapt into the air, condensing gigawatts of electricity in his right fist. His [Atomic Collapse Fist: Indra's Hammer] didn't hit the ground to create area damage; it directly struck the armor of the commander trying to flee the mass of boneless flesh. The violet electricity bypassed the metal and fried the nervous system of the commander and fifty men around him, carbonizing them from the inside out. Maren waded into the resulting chaos, his greatsword cleaving the paralyzed survivors of the lightning strike in two, a symphony of brutal, methodical terror.
However, despite the apocalypse raining down on the infantry, the true resources of the Alliance and the Violet Cloud—their Stage 1 and Stage 2 Saints—were attempting to coordinate a counterattack.
A group of eight Stage 2 Saints, commanders from various elite families, gathered in a lotus flower formation, pointing their weapons toward the center of the Sequences. They knew that if they died here, their sects would lose centuries of foundation.
"Kill them all, don't even leave the corpses!" roared one of the Saints, preparing to detonate his own Dantian in a suicide attack that would sweep the entire crater.
But the Morningstar Empire did not allow waste.
From the shadows of the rubble, Orion, the Puppeteer, smiled with sickly sadism. His Void Crystal Fingertips had already woven an invisible web in the air.
"Ah, ah, ah... Saint meat is a scarce commodity. The Patriarch would be annoyed if you break it," Orion whispered.
Before the orthodox Saint could detonate his Dantian, Darius, the Inquisitor, emerged from the blind flank. His Absorbent Void Eyes locked onto the eight Saints. He activated the [Inverted Board]. He didn't attack them physically. He injected a conceptual virus into their minds, a cognitive miasma that hacked their perceptions.
The eight Stage 2 Saints dropped their weapons, clutching their heads and screaming in inhuman agony. In their minds, they felt they were being flayed alive, that their bones were being submerged in acid, and that hell itself was chewing them up. Their concentration shattered, nullifying any attempt at self-destruction.
It was time for the Macabre Recycling.
Orion flicked his fingers, driving his spiritual threads directly into the nervous systems of the Saints driven mad by Darius. Suddenly, the bodies of the eight orthodox men straightened up like marionettes. Their eyes were blank, but their auras remained at the Saint level.
Under Orion's laughter, the eight Saints turned and began massacring their own disciples with terrifying efficiency. Enemy morale didn't just fracture, it pulverized. Seeing their own masters mercilessly decapitating them shattered the alliance's psyche.
To secure the merchandise, Draven emerged from the shadows, his Earth-Grade restraint chains wrapping around the Saints' bodies as Orion turned them off one by one. Magnus, the Iron Titan, walked up like an immovable colossus, grabbing the unconscious Saints by the neck and throwing them toward the collection center, where they would be claimed later.
"Excellent material," grunted Magnus, his voice resonating from his Vajra chest. "Lady Vexia will be pleased. The Dead Blood Guard just got new captains."
Despite the absolute superiority of the Morningstars, the volume of enemies was overwhelming. Tens of thousands of attacks flew randomly, desperate magic, poisoned arrows, and suicide explosions. Amidst that torrent, a sword beam from a dying Elder managed to graze Aylin's shoulder, opening a superficial cut that began to bleed.
In a normal war of attrition, these small wounds would add up until they caused the geniuses to fall. But the logistics of the Sequences were a perversion of the laws of life.
Cassius, the Jade Lancer, noticed the cut on Aylin's shoulder. His Divine Chlorophyll Eyes locked onto the leader of an orthodox elite family who was trying to flee up the side of the crater.
Cassius moved like a green specter. His jade spear struck with surgical precision into the central node of the enemy leader's spine. The [Primordial Root Thrust] activated. The orthodox leader's body withered instantly, his skin sticking to his bones as his blood, his Qi, and his very life expectancy (pure longevity) were absorbed by the spear.
The stolen energy shot out from the back end of the weapon like a blinding green beam of light. Elowen and Lys, positioned in the center of the formation, received this torrent of stolen life. With a synchronized movement, Elowen channeled her Universal Elixir Blood and Lys expanded her purification domain, redirecting the vital energy directly into Aylin's shoulder.
The cut healed in a millisecond, not even leaving a scar. The fatigue vanished.
The few orthodox commanders who witnessed this fell to their knees, true terror chilling their blood. They realized the macabre reality: they were not fighting an army of geniuses. They were fighting immortal divine parasites. Every wound the Sequences received, they healed by stealing the life of the Alliance leaders. As long as there were orthodox people to kill, the Morningstar Clan would have infinite health and stamina.
In the sky, high above the terrestrial massacre, the jade lotus platforms housing the true leaders of the expedition trembled.
The three Stage 8 Saints, the absolute authority figures of the Iron Blood Alliance and the Violet Cloud (surpassed only by the Great Saint), watched with bloodshot eyes as their armies, formations, and lesser Saints were swept away like dust in the rain. In less than three minutes, the entire vanguard had ceased to exist.
False Pride erupted.
"Bastard heretics!" roared one of the Stage 8 Saints, a massive man covered in plates of molten red armor. His fury was so immense that the sky around him turned scarlet. "Do you think the Laws of brats can defy the foundation of eight centuries of cultivation?! I will crush you along with this mountain!"
The Stage 8 Iron Blood Saint clapped his palms together. Space groaned and wept as a literal meteor of molten iron, the size of a small castle and burning at tens of thousands of degrees, materialized in the sky. The gravitational pressure of the meteor began to melt the stones of the crater before it even fell. It was an ultimate attack, designed to vaporize the Forty-Five Sequences in a single area-of-effect strike.
Kael Morningstar looked up. Through the Nexus, the order was instantaneous. "The Twins. Now."
From the center of the Morningstar army, Aion and Aia stepped forward in unison. Their pale silver hair waved against the apocalyptic heat of the falling meteor. There was no fear on their beautiful, identical faces; only the cold certainty of an impregnable paradox.
To ensure the impact didn't damage the terrain where their allies fought, Goran, Tormund, Altair, and Lirael moved at breakneck speed, positioning themselves around the Twins in a diamond formation, stabilizing the spatial anchor of the area.
The molten iron meteor crashed into them.
Or, rather, it tried to.
Aion, the Immovable Hammer, planted his feet and expanded his Dark Matter Stellar Dragon Bloodline. He activated the [Black Hole Shield: Void Inertia]. All the mass, heat, and kinetic force of the Stage 8 meteor did not hit him; it was sucked into an artificial center of gravity in front of his chest.
The immense meteor deformed, collapsing in on itself. The force of an attack capable of erasing a city was compressed, screaming against the laws of physics, until it became a sphere of pure energy the size of an apple that floated docilely between Aion's heavy hands. He took no damage; his extreme Yin body simply consumed the impact.
The Stage 8 Saint's eyes in the sky threatened to pop out of their sockets upon seeing his ultimate technique turned into a simple glowing sphere held by a Stage 1 youth.
Aia, the Fluid Mirror, let out a sadistic, crystalline laugh. "Thanks for the gift, grandpa. Let me return it with interest."
Aia took the energy sphere from her brother's hands and used her Starlight / Acceleration. She activated the [Refracted Light Spear]. She didn't just return the attack; she redirected it and multiplied it by three using Aion's immense reserve density.
The sphere burst into a beam of concentrated light so fast that reality couldn't process it. The beam didn't travel in a straight line. It hit an invisible reality mirror Aia had created in the air, refracting in ten different directions and converging instantly on the Stage 8 Saint in the sky.
The orthodox Saint barely had time to raise his Qi defenses before the light pierced him. The multiplied power of his own meteor tore off the right half of his torso and his entire right arm in an explosion of blood and charred bone. The Stage 8 Saint shrieked, falling from the sky like a broken doll, crashing onto the slope of the crater, alive but useless, his pride shattered by the absolute paradox of the Binary Eclipse.
"Impossible!" screamed the second Stage 8 Saint, a Matrix Master from the Violet Cloud. Seeing his comrade fall, his panic turned into an icy madness. "They're monsters! Trap their souls! River of Death Prison Formation!"
The Matrix Master unrolled a scroll bathed in ancient blood. An immense Spiritual Domain, a swamp of weeping souls and corrosive sludge covering a square kilometer, descended upon the Morningstar squad to swallow them whole. It was a massive area technique, undodgeable.
But the Morningstar Clan didn't need to dodge.
Jareth, the Toxicologist, and Mira, the Crimson Viper, emerged from the formation. They were backed by the lethal squad of Tamsin, Ren, Joren, and Elara, who isolated the space around them to prevent interference.
"What a pathetic technique," whispered Jareth, his black nails dripping purple acid. "Everything has a life cycle. Even magic."
"Let it rot," hissed Mira, her vertical amethyst pupils glowing with pleasure.
Jareth exhaled his [Mist of the Fallen Era], while Mira launched an arc of her Phantom Blood. They didn't attack the Stage 8 Saint; they attacked the very concept of the Spiritual Domain.
When the blood and miasma of both poisonous bloodlines touched the Soul Swamp, the magical technique collapsed biologically. The domain became "infected." The weeping souls of the swamp began to rot, the sludge turned into a hyper-corrosive acid that lost its loyalty to the creator. The Intent of Miasma and Venom propagated through the Qi ties of the technique, traveling up the magical thread directly toward the Stage 8 Saint who had invoked it.
The Matrix Master in the sky felt his own meridians burn. His technique, his life's pride, had become a parasite flowing back into his body. The Domain erupted toxically. The Stage 8 Saint himself began to melt in the sky, his skin turning dark purple as his lungs liquefied from breathing the backlash of his own poisoned magic. He fell into the abyss, gurgling blood and acid, dying in the most painful way imaginable.
The simultaneous and humiliating annihilation of two of the three Stage 8 Saints was the straw that broke the camel's back of orthodox sanity.
Hundreds of elite leaders, commanders, and the last Stage 8 Saint, terrified, turned around and took flight, attempting to flee the Broken Mountain Range with all their might. The treasure no longer mattered. Surviving those forty-five demons was the only goal.
"Cowards," murmured Sylas, the Hawkeye.
He stood atop an obsidian rock. Beside him, Varian, the Sky Hunter. Backing them, Selene (The Whistling Wind), Lia (The Eye of the Storm), Ciro, and Nylas formed the definitive anti-aircraft artillery platoon of the Eternal Dawn.
Sylas didn't draw his bowstring aiming at the deserters in the sky. His Wind Eagle Eye, embedded in his socket, processed zero friction and future trajectory. He aimed at empty space.
"Destiny is already written," Sylas whispered, releasing the string.
Beside him, Varian activated his Fixed Destiny Authority. His arrows didn't travel through the air; they materialized directly into the result.
High in the sky, the deserters who believed they had escaped hell began to fall. The last Stage 8 Saint, flying at the speed of sound almost three kilometers away, felt a crunch. Without a single whistle of wind, Sylas's arrow, traveling through a corridor of absolute vacuum, materialized, piercing his skull from ear to ear.
Selene sent her intangible projectiles through the cowards' breaths; the arrows solidified directly inside their hearts. Lia turned the fleeing commanders' nervous systems into lightning rods, drawing lightning from the blue sky that carbonized them mid-flight.
It was a rain of orthodox corpses. No one who had set foot in the Broken Mountain Range with hostile intentions had permission to leave it alive. The vanguard was annihilated. The pride of Stage 8, trampled.
High above the massacre, on the shadowy deck of the Herald of the Void, Lilith Morningstar watched the inferno with cold satisfaction. Beside her, Sienna took a sip of tea, her silver eyes fixed on the only enemy figure who had not yet moved.
Below, on the last remaining throne of swords in the sky, the Great Saint of the Iron Blood Alliance opened his eyes. A Stage 4 Great Saint aura—a power that could make entire empires kneel—erupted in the crater. The air itself began to crack under his divine wrath.
Lilith smiled, running her fingers over the crimson crystal Samael had given her.
The cleansing was over. It was time to hunt the expedition's great saint.