The war drums of Bonewither Cliff pounded like a terrified heart, echoing back from the cliff walls yet already drowned beneath the oncoming roar of dragons. Every disciple of the Skyfiend Sect felt the echo boom inside his chest, sowing raw panic.
Pillars of murky violet light, each tainted with a sinister aura, speared up from the deepest bone palaces buried in Bonewither Cliff. In the same heartbeat, the sect defense formation flared to its fiercest state. A deep, metallic thrum rolled across the mountains, shaking loose dust from the skull-lined walls.
A colossal dome of gray-black light surged upward like an overturned bowl, sealing the entire Skyfiend Sect Headquarters within its ghostly embrace. Faces—twisted, screaming, half-formed—swam beneath the barrier’s surface. Disgusting blood-rot stung the nose while a chill burrowed straight into the soul, proof of the barrier’s corrosive, brutal defense.
“Who dares trespass upon the sacred ground of the Skyfiend Sect? Show yourself and be damned!”
The words scraped the air like bone on bone, an owl’s midnight screech laced with fury and a shred of startled doubt. They drifted down from the sky above the main shrine.
Then, out of nothing, an elder materialized, draped in dark-purple robes embroidered with labyrinthine skulls, a Bone Sceptre forged from an entire spine clenched in his claw-thin hand.
His skin clung to the skeleton beneath; eye sockets yawned cavernous and empty save for twin fox-green flames that betrayed a formidable well of life.
This was Elder Bonewick, Mortimer Bonewick, supreme master of the Skyfiend Sect, perched at the razor’s edge of the Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Three and nearly unchallenged.
His arrival poured steel into the spines of every panicked disciple.
One after another, shrieks of wind announced more power. A dozen senior elders, wrapped in chains, beating human-skin drums, brandishing ghost-banners, fanned out behind Bonewick.
None stood beneath the Heavenly Immortal Realm; three matched their supreme elder’s rank.
Across Level Nine, such a roster was why the Skyfiend Sect dared proclaim itself the apex of the demonic path. Yet when their gazes pierced the barrier and truly drank in the heavens, that confidence withered to ash, replaced by gaping, speechless horror.
Draconians. Not one. Not ten. A rolling storm of hundreds, a living night sky of scales and talons!
Their titanic bodies blotted out the sun, casting Bonewither Cliff beneath a death-black shadow. Solid, murderous dragon’s power mixed with fresh battlefield bloodlust, pressing down like a personal domain.
Especially the dragons leading the army. One, an obsidian drake the size of a mountain, its scales glinting like cold metal and its eyes twin blood-red moons, radiated a menace that even Elder Bonewick felt gnaw at his heart.
Beside it hovered dragons of every hue, each ancient, each terrible. Worst of all, a lone figure stood atop the black dragon’s skull, silhouette razor-sharp against the muted sky, an unknown presence that froze even seasoned fiends to the marrow.
Jared stood in a sweep of green robes. His posture was as straight as a spear, his features carved in chill granite, and his eyes held the unmoving silence of an ancient winter pool, yet they were deep enough to devour every stray glimmer of light.
He needed no flourish. By merely standing at the van of the Draconian army, he became its pulse and center, the calm core around which waves of scaled warriors waited, blades humming beneath a sky steeped in killing intent.
A gray-haired elder who had once glimpsed Jared in passing suddenly lost control of his composure. His bony shoulders shook, and his words cracked on the verge of sobs.
“J-Jared… Jared Chance! It’s him! How can he be alive, here of all places? Lord Soul Devourer swore he was already on death’s door. Does that… Does that look like a dying man to you?”
