Shock flashed across the Fire Spirit Lord’s features, had never imagined his rival could close the distance so brutally fast.
He twisted aside, robe flaring, and flicked his wrist. A spear of molten gold, pure star-fire, erupted from his palm and roared back toward the advancing demon.
Gold and crimson collided with a thunderclap that cracked heaven’s vault. The explosion sent jagged ripples of pressure racing across the valley. A circular shockwave blossomed from their clash, rolling outward in rings of scalding light.
Mountains shattered, whole ridgelines crumbled as it struck by invisible hammers. The ground split apart, revealing gorges so deep they swallowed their own echoes. Above, clouds shredded, exposing a swirling blood-red vortex that roared like a living storm.
Inside that maelstrom, Jared and his companions staggered, vision spinning, as they summoned every ounce of spiritual energy to keep their feet.
Then terror struck again.
The Demonic Cultivators and roaming demonic souls stationed around the valley were caught by the wave and vaporized where they stood, one ragged scream lingered, then even the ashes were gone.
If those two keep fighting, not only are we finished, but the entire level six could be wiped clean…
“Everyone, inside the Dragon Bell. Move, now!” shouted Jared. He snatched a bronze bell no larger than his fist from his storage ring.
A clear, resonant chime rang out. The artifact ballooned to the height of a watchtower, its dragon engravings flooding the air with gold light and folding the group inside.
Sheltered within, they felt the crushing pressure ease, though distant tremors still hammered the bell’s walls. Yet the battle outside only intensified. The valley heaved like a living beast
while detonations boomed without pause. Peaks toppled, the earth yawned wider, and the crimson vortex above twisted into an even more monstrous grin.
Through narrow seams in the bell, they watched.
High overhead, streaks of gold and crimson wove together, forming lethal ribbons that slashed across the darkened sky with every collision.
Each impact boomed like doomsday bells, each pulse of power strong enough to bend the horizon.
The Fire Spirit Lord wielded a sword wrought from living gold flame, every stroke elegant yet apocalyptic.
Under his command the blade morphed-one moment a roaring dragon of fire, the next a soaring phoenix, each incarnation diving at the Fire Demon Lord in a storm of incandescent wrath.
The Fire Demon Lord fought without a single piece of steel in his grasp. Yet every motion of his bare arms felt heavy enough to tilt a world.
Dark-crimson fire wrapped his hands, shifting in a heartbeat from hooked talons to knuckled hammers. Each blazing fist crashed against the golden sword wielded by the Fire Spirit Lord.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
The sky rang like a cathedral bell struck past endurance. Sparks fanned out in starbursts, lighting the dusk brighter than noon. Braids of gold and crimson fire twisted together, collided, then flew apart, hurling shockwaves that galloped across the horizon.
Space warped. The air folded in on itself, groaning as though the seams of the universe were about to split. In the far distance, whole mountains, immovable for millennia, shuddered, cracked, and collapsed like damp clay under an invisible hammer.
A high, ragged scream knifed through the uproar and was snuffed out almost before the echo could form.
One nearby peak vanished in a single breath, ground to dust beneath the roiling blast. Every living thing upon it, cultivator, creature, even crawling insects, was erased, leaving not ash but empty air.
Inside the Dragon Bell, Jared and the others stared, mouths open, unable to decide whether they were witnessing history or the end of it.
“T-That’s way too horrifying!” Yuliana gasped, the tremor in voice betraying the quake inside chest.
“So this is the strength of the ancient experts,” Aurelius whispered, his face chalk-white. “It’s terror made visible…”
