“It’s still better than getting stuck,” Jared answered under his breath. “Better to face uncertainty head-on than be trapped forever in the dark.”
The Dragonslayer Sword gleamed in his grip as he ripped through the folds of reality. Without a prepared passage, his speed dropped sharply, every step a grind against the fabric of existence.
“Kid, incoming!” the Vermilion Demon Lord barked. No sooner had the warning sounded than a thunderous detonation split the silence.
Before Jared’s eyes, the space itself fractured, shards of shimmering moments scattering like broken glass. From that jagged rupture, a formless silhouette oozed into view, shadow darker than the void behind it.
Jared did not wait to learn whether the newcomer came in peace. The Dragonslayer Sword whistled forward in a single golden arc, his body following the blade’s promise of first strike, no regret. He knew the creed well—strike first, survive; hesitate, perish.
A wet crack sounded. The sword pierced the shadow, yet the silhouette disintegrated instantly, as if it had only ever been a trick of the light.
The stars around him blurred, smeared into liquid colors. Some hidden force wove itself around Jared, tugging him away from familiar spacetime and toward an unknown elsewhere.
Jared’s heart lurched, the shock so fierce it felt like a fist closing around his ribs. He had never imagined a presence inside this warped pocket of time that could steer his every move without ever revealing a face.
“Die, now!” He snapped the sword through the air. A single stroke cracked the surrounding continuum, fissures racing outward like lightning across black glass.
Blades of light poured from those cracks, ten thousand slivers of murdering brilliance that tore the fabric of the realm apart. As they spread, the unseen pressure that had been clinging to him began to thin, as though burned off by the glare.
Every nerve in his body twanged tight, a bowstring drawn to its limit. He still could not name the shadow stalking him, only sensed that anyone who could track him through chaotic void currents and peel open spatial walls in silence must dwell somewhere beyond dread itself.
The force coiling around him, cold, inexorable, carried the bite of an alien law that promised no appeal.
“Show yourself, coward! Come out and face me!” His roar ricocheted through the broken shards of space, but nothing answered except the hollow hiss of emptiness.
The invisible drag tightened. Colors bled into spirals, the whole scene spinning like paint sucked down a drain until only a vortex of bruised light remained.
He dared not pause. Celestial essence of the Human Immortal Realm Level Two burst through his meridians, a river in spring flood.
The Dragonslayer Sword felt that hunger and sang, a keening, metallic cry. Dark-gold runes ignited along the blade, each rune pulsing with ruin.
Jared flicked his wrist. Essence rushed into the weapon, shaping a strike at once sharper and more ruthless than any thrust.
“Cleave!” A column of light flared a thousand fathoms high. Compressed sword-energy erupted like a cyclone, tearing outward from him in every direction.
This was no reckless swing. Each arc carried his first grasp of dimensional law, slicing at the exact knots where the binding force anchored itself.
Ripping sounds overlapped, shards of warped space spider-webbing apart like shattered mirrors. The chill pull on his limbs faltered, wobbling like a line about to snap. Relief steeled him. His assault only grew more savage.
Sword-light crossed and recrossed, until the very air became a thicket of death. Fragments of sundered dimension whirled inside that thicket, forming a localized storm where anything caught within would be ground to dust.
At the maelstrom‘s brightest instant, the vanishing silhouette returned. It did not step in from any direction; it bled into existence, the way ink blooms through water.
No face, no edges, only a man-shaped knot of twisting black, crowned by two scarlet pinpoints that stared through him with dead, indifferent patience.
