The ferocity and inborn sorcery of the Draconians blossomed without restraint. Scales gleamed, claws flashed, and every breath carried a primordial law.
Though the apparition drew power from a higher plane, the coordinated assault of these apex dragons shackled it completely, denying it any chance to strike elsewhere.
Meanwhile, additional Draconians dived into the ranks of the Skyfiend Sect, whose protective array had already collapsed. The once-orderly formation dissolved into chaos the instant living thunder and living steel crashed among them.
In the blink of an eye, the battle tipped into its most savage, blood-soaked phase.
Black dragons, coiling dragons, and other thick-scaled breeds formed the spearhead. They shredded flesh with talons, swept crowds aside with iron tails, and weathered stray spells as though their hides were moving fortresses, trampling the sect’s lines into broken mounds.
Elemental dragons followed just behind, venting their fury with reckless abandon.
A sweep of dragonfire left scorched wasteland. Lightning fell like divine verdicts, reducing bodies to ash. Glacial breath birthed forests of ice statues, while hurricanes erased every trace of bone or banner.
Dragon roars, detonations, screams, the crack of bone, the collapse of stone—together they composed a deafening symphony of annihilation.
The Skyfiend Sect’s disciples were vicious, yet in raw strength, will, and racial talent, they were hopelessly outclassed by the vengeance-driven Draconian army under Jared’s unified command.
Worse still, their grand elders fell one after another beneath Jared’s blade, Dragonslayer, and the sect’s greatest reliance, the Hell Deity apparition, remained hopelessly entangled.
The rout became an avalanche!
Panic spread through the Skyfiend ranks like plague. Those who tried to fight were drowned in dragonfire within a heartbeat. Those who fled found every exit sealed by swift Wind and Cloud Dragons.
The rest were crushed to pulp beneath uncaring claws.
Blood painted Bonewither Cliff crimson, streaming down the chalk-white escarpment in thin rivers that dyed the poison mists below a ghostly pink.
The copper stench of fresh slaughter even smothered the millennia-old reek of death and malice clinging to this place.
Amid the carnage, Jared flashed from shadow to shadow, his purpose razor-clear: eliminate every Heavenly Immortal elder to decapitate the Sect’s command.
Nothing survived a single exchange against his Dragonslayer Sword.
Jared’s grasp of the Heavenly Law deepened with every heartbeat. At times, he bent Time Acceleration around himself, moving in a blur mortals could not track. At times, he folded space, crossing stadium-long distances in a single ghostly step. His Five-Element Sword Force split into thousands of blades, striking multiple foes in perfect unison!
Elder Bonewick watched his cherished elite die by the hundreds, and felt as though his heart were bleeding away. These people had been the wealth he hoarded through centuries of cruelty, and they were being butchered like cattle.
Elder Bonewick drove the apparition in a frenzy, flinging rivers of black starlight across the shattered air. Yet Coall, shoulder to shoulder with three ancient Draconians, wove an iron-tight dance of fang and gale that never broke rhythm.
Strike by strike, they seized the momentum. The apparition’s dark brilliance dulled, its colossal outline flickering like a candle caught in the wind.
“Master Soul Devourer, Lord Soul Devourer… How much longer will you watch? If you refuse to appear, we will all be buried here, and your grand design will rot with us!”
His scream shredded the dusk with a mix of desperation and venom, the sound of a traitor who suddenly suspected he had been used and abandoned.
Bonewick knew, felt it in the marrow of every cursed bone he carried, that the Soul Devourer lurked close by, or at least had left a sliver of will hovering over the battlefield.
Nothing else explained how those earlier, razor-accurate reports about Jared’s injuries had reached the sect so swiftly.
As if the cliff itself answered the plea, a breath of ice-cold malignance burst from the deepest gouge of Bonewither Cliff, carrying the taste of acid on every mote of wind.
It seeped from beneath a grotesque altar piled high with skulls, the densest knot of corruption in the entire abyss.
Though small and wavering, that mist bore immense pressure; even Jared and the apex Draconians felt their hearts jerk like hunted birds.
