But the reprieve ended there. The Soul Devourer’s cultivation towered far above Sylvia’s, an ocean against a candle flame. Any temporary restraint was meaningless beside such weight.
In less than a breath, the sword light shattered with a dull roar. The ice-blue sword shrieked, fractures racing along the blade before it splintered into glittering shards.
A backlash of demonic aura tore into Sylvia’s body. She screamed as if threaded with poisoned needles, blood seeped from every pore until she was painted red, then she crashed to the floor, breath thin as spider silk.
The desperate strike of two Heavenly Immortal experts had not slowed that colossal palm even for an instant.
They couldn’t even force the Soul Devourer to lift a finger in earnest. That alone spoke volumes, and the message was terrifying.
Inside the frozen prism of warped space and halted time, Jared watched in horror as Neville and Sylvia hurled themselves forward to shield him.
Blades of darkness carved their flesh, dropping them in mangled silence, and something savage tore through Jared’s chest, hotter than any flame, darker than any pit.
A roar ripped from his throat, more beast than man. His eyes blazed crimson, pupils drowning in blood-red rage. Spiritual energy howled through his meridians at a suicidal pace, tearing micro-fissures in its path yet surging on.
He lashed the newborn principle of Time Acceleration to its limits, desperate to pry open the spatial coffin.
“Open, now!” Jared roared.
The very air answered with a metallic hum, a low, vibrating buzz that rattled bones.
Time’s flow convulsed around him. Hairline cracks skittered across the frozen cage, small as dust motes yet unmistakable, a first wound in the cage.
Within that millionth of a heartbeat, Jared clamped both hands around the Dragonslayer Sword, pouring every shred of strength, wrath, and refusal to die into the blade.
“Nascence power, fuse. Time Acceleration, cleave!”
Gold, jade, sapphire, scarlet, and amber flared together, no longer a loose sword aura but five condensed chains of primal law spiraling up the weapon. Around the steel, time itself sprinted, driving the stroke past the reach of conscious thought.
A beam burst forth, like the universe’s first light piercing primordial darkness. It raced upward, defiant, aiming to slice apart the titanic black palm already blotting out the sky over his head.
This was Jared’s absolute limit, his single, unrepeatable, do-or-die strike. Inside it coiled his grasp of nascence power and his newborn intimacy with the law of time.
“Oh?” the Soul Devourer finally murmured, the first hint of emotion brushing his face.
The ferocity and layered laws braided through Jared’s swing had caught even him off guard. For once, the ancient monster acknowledged an attack worth noticing.
The collision did not pass in silence this time. It thundered, rolling, mountain-shaking thunder.
Prismatic sword-light slammed into the pitch-black demon’s hand. Stars seemed to crash, detonate, and collapse in the same instant, releasing a storm of power too vast for language.
Crack!
The sky itself seemed to split as a cataclysmic roar followed.
Nethergate Sect’s grand hall, already little more than a wounded monument, finally gave way. The great dome blew apart in a blinding eruption, and every wall collapsed like a child’s sandcastle under a merciless tide.
Splintered beams and jagged stones whirled upward, snatched by an unseen vortex before being shredded to dust in midair.
Light so searing it felt white-hot burned away all sight. Thunder that could split bone ripped away all hearing.
Only the true horror remained, an expanding shock wave, rolling out from the epicenter in pitiless rings, the ripples of death itself.
Disciples of Nethergate Sect fled in panicked knots, yet the wave ran faster than any mortal foot. Screams strangled in their throats as the trailing energy caught them. Bodies, souls, hopes, everything, turned to drifting ash.
When it passed, the entire mountain gate looked as if some titanic boot had stomped straight through. Pavilions toppled like dominoes, spires cracked, whole peaks split open, and the very earth pitched and rolled.
It felt like the end of days!
