Whoom! Energy snapped into the waiting formation; the Nine Heavens Sword Array awoke like a celestial beast stretching, every rune on the pavilion blades burning silver. Nine hundred flying swords wove a lattice a league wide, and inside that lattice, sword-light condensed into a hard, silver rain that poured toward the ranks of the Ninefold Nether Palace.
“Petty tricks…” Morven’s laugh held no warmth. He flung out a robed arm. “Nether Styx Formation! Rise!”
Three thousand disciples knelt in perfect unison, seals flashing between their fingers as black miasma coiled upward. Above them, a titanic onyx palace took shape in the clouds, its gates yawning open to vomit a tide of wailing specters that slammed headlong into the falling swords. Steel hissed against ectoplasmic flesh, each impact a spray of light and shadow. Explosions rolled across the firmament in ragged succession, louder than thunder, too many to count.
Swordlight sparked in Oswald’s pupils, sharp enough to cut breath. Space folded over him. In the same heartbeat, he vanished. Cold wind slapped his cheeks when reality snapped open again—this time only ten paces before Morven’s armored war cart.
“Morven, take my strike!” Oswald’s roar hammered the frozen air. He swung the iron sword in a bare, horizontal arc—no flourish, no mercy, only the terrifying purity of blade and will fused as one. For an instant, he felt nothing of himself; steel thought for him, hunted for him.
Across the blood-slicked cart, Morven’s pitch-black irises narrowed. The corpse-thin lord slowly unfolded from his throne. One skeletal finger lifted, drifting through empty air as though outlining a doorway only he could see.
“Nether Styx Finger…” The murmur sounded like soil falling on a coffin lid.
Blade met bone. All that existed between them was intent—one burning, the other abyssal. The sky forgot how to breathe; nothing moved, not even dust. Edge and fingertip touched. No ring of metal, no burst of force, only a hair-thin black seam silently spreading, carving the heavens apart.
One breath… Two… Three…
Boom!
The universe remembered its voice and screamed it. A shockwave detonated outward, using their locked wills as its fuse. The blast punched Oswald back. Wind howled past as he tumbled a hundred paces before catching himself. The iron sword quivered in his grip, a hair-thin crack crawling along its face like frost. Copper tasted sweet at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes burned brighter.
“High Immortal, fourth level… So that’s all you’ve got!”
Morven’s stare cut colder than his magic, yet disbelief flickered in that darkness. He had expected Oswald to break, not bend. Oswald felt Jared’s earlier words echo between his ribs: *steady the heart, let the blade listen.* That counsel now roared through every tendon; not even Morven’s abyss could drown it.
“Sword masters, always a nuisance.” Morven’s voice was ice grinding on stone.
The words had not finished falling before Oswald lunged back into the storm, cracked sword screaming for blood. They tore across the sky, his silver arcs clashing against coils of black miasma. Each collision fractured another shard of firmament, starlight bleeding through the wounds. Oswald flung every secret he had into the blade, and still it begged for more. He felt the hot pull in his chest, sacred blood ignited, the scent of iron turning sweet and dizzying.
Reason whispered that his body would soon fail, but despair was quieter than duty. If he held anything back, Morven would erase him in three strokes. A flicker below drew his eye—sparks blooming across the Five-Element Sect’s valley.
At the center of the range, Aurelian anchored the peaks while five elders guarded the flanks and three thousand disciples held their posts.
“Five-Element Heaven-Sealing Barrier, rise!”
Aurelian’s fingers locked into the final seal; the tendons in his wrists burned with the strain. He forced the word out, a command more felt than heard, vibrating in his chest like iron struck.
“Enact!” The five elders answered in unison, their voices overlapping until the single syllable thundered against the inside of his skull. A low tremor rolled up through the soles of his boots as three thousand six hundred embedded origin stones flared at once, their light stabbing upward through the earth’s crust.
From each summit, a different hue erupted—gold, green, indigo, crimson, umber—five spears of light spearing into the clouds before knitting together into a single, towering shell that curved over the entire range. Pressure thickened inside the barrier; every subtle current of the elemental laws suddenly roared like a river at flood stage.
Beyond the shimmering shell, enemy cultivators who relied on foreign arts reeled. Inside, his own disciples moved like trout in spring melt, their spells swelling with a strength that made the air ring.
Ferrum’s shout cracked across the peaks. “Metal Branch, form the Celestial Metal Sword Array!” A rippling metallic chorus answered; three hundred life-bound swords burst from their sheaths, converging overhead until they fused into a single hundred-yard blade.
Woodric’s voice followed. “Wood Branch! Azurewood Cage!” Thick emerald vines punched through the soil, writhing around enemy ankles. The moment they tightened, color drained from the trapped men as the vines drank them dry.
At his periphery, the Water, Fire, and Earth branches unleashed their own masterpieces, turning the battlefield into a shifting mosaic of steam, flame, and jagged stone. In the span of a breath, the outer slopes became an elemental inferno.
A scoffing voice slid through the uproar, “A petty element barrier, this is the extent of your bravado?”
Aurelian’s stomach tightened; Malcolm had finally moved. The warlord stepped off his grotesque bone litter, weaving a sigil before his chest. “Reincarnation! Spellbreaker!”
Ash-colored aura poured from him, coalescing overhead into a titanic pallid hand that crashed downward toward the barrier. Where the palm passed, the elemental laws bent, then unraveled.
“Not good…” The taste of copper filled Aurelian’s mouth as he poured everything he had into the barrier. The five-hued shell shuddered violently; hairline cracks spidered across its surface.
“Master Metalhart, let me help!” Gerald vaulted into the air. With hands raised, he cradled a lotus of molten gold and crimson that bloomed in his palms. “Earthfire True Flame! Heavenburn!”
Endless Earthfire erupted from the lotus, twisting into nine crimson-gold dragons that roared upward to meet the pallid hand. From Gerald’s vantage, ruthless flames butted against reincarnation aura overhead. The sky tore into two halves—one searing gold, the other ashen and cold.
Malcolm’s voice sailed across the battlefield: “Gerald… You’ve grown old…” A scornful curve twisted Malcolm’s lip. He raised his second hand, fingers carving another brutal seal. “Reincarnation! Soul Devourer!”
A second pallid palm condensed beside Malcolm, then plunged toward Gerald with the eagerness of a starving beast. Gerald grunted, shoulders pitching but not folding. He forced himself upright, and the lotus of flame around him blazed brighter.
High above the valley, Gerald’s Earthfire True Flame slammed again into Malcolm’s reincarnation aura. Every collision shot a concussion downward, splintering the ridgelines like dried timber. While their fury rattled the clouds, Jared kept still. He stood at the razor edge of Gold Peak, eyes shut, spine loose, as though he were letting some unseen clock finish its count.
Heat prickled along the five-colored sigil stamped across the back of his right hand. Deep inside his core, the Origin Star wheeled faster and faster, a silent forge at full bellows. Jared let his mind stretch outward, following every restless current the battle had birthed.
Somewhere beneath the roar, a single joint in the chaos clicked into place, waiting to be broken. The word surfaced, solid and cold: *Now.*
His eyes snapped open. Five hues whirled across the irises, braided themselves together, then collapsed into a single veil of storm-gray. And he saw it. The puppet driving Blaine back jerked in hard, mechanical rhythms. Before each lunge, a pinprick twitch in its aura betrayed the angle of the blow.
Elsewhere, Morven’s poison-dark art slithered around Oswald’s blinding sword light. The blade still scorched the shadows, but Jared felt its heat gutter—ten strikes more and it would fail. Gerald’s Earthfire roared bright, yet Malcolm’s reincarnation haze crept endlessly back, like a tide swallowing a torch.
Time, Jared sensed, would bleed the elder dry. Below, the Five-Element Barrier crumpled at its edges under the pounding of those ancient monsters: Witherbone, Bloodsea, and their kin. Something had to snap.
Jared moved. One step, and his body blurred into a smear of stormy light, shooting straight for the circle where Blaine wrestled the puppet.
