Elder Bonewick’s eyelids twitched so violently they seemed ready to tear loose. His skeletal fingers clenched the Bone Sceptre until the knuckles blanched. Inside, his heart hammered against his chest.
The Soul Devourer’s confident assurances still rang in his ears. Yet here loomed a Draconian army bristling with war lust. And above it hovered Jared, his aura as bottomless as the sea, not a hint of injury marring him. The sight slapped Elder Bonewick across the face, and smashed the fate of the Skyfiend Sect along with it.
“Panic will get us nowhere!” Elder Bonewick forced down his terror, and the urge to curse whoever had lied to him, then bellowed, his voice bolstered by Netherlord force so it boomed across the mountains.
“They are nothing but an overgrown clutch of serpents led by a reckless youth. With our Ten-Thousand-Soul Grand Array, even a sovereign would break his teeth against our walls. Form up the array, prepare to meet the enemy!”
Before his last word finished echoing, Jared moved. He ignored the barrier that shimmered around the headquarters, ignored Elder Bonewick’s shrill command. Instead, his measuring gaze drifted over the sect’s twisted architecture, as if searching for something.
“Who commands the Skyfiend Sect? Kneel and accept your death!” Jared’s voice was not loud, yet it pierced every layer of spellwork and space, sliding into the ear of every disciple poised for battle.
Each word carried a frost-edged weight.
“And you, Soul Devourer, skulking in the dark, come out. Sending ants to die while you cower like a turtle in its shell—is that how you do things?” Contempt curled through every syllable he uttered.
It had been a long time since Jared felt this good. He used to be the one being hunted down. He’d get beaten to the brink of death until someone took pity on him and hauled him from the brink.
Today, he needed no savior. Behind him marched a Draconian army unbeaten across Level Nine.
Be it the Skyfiend Sect or the Soul Devourer, in Jared’s eyes, they were trash. He meant to ride his Draconian army straight to the peak.
Hearing his own name spat with such naked disdain, Elder Bonewick felt every vein in his skull ignite. Never, especially not within his own sect and before so many disciples, had anyone humiliated him so thoroughly.
Rage poured from him like smoke from a cracked furnace, and even the bone banners overhead quivered in the heat of it.
“Jared Chance, you impudent stripling, enough of your swagger!” Elder Bonewick drove the Bone Sceptre down against empty air.
Rings of ash-gray ripples rippled outward, soft as smoke yet heavy with menace.
“You barge into the sacred heart of my Skyfiend Sect and fling bluster like gravel. Do you take us for mud statues that dissolve the moment it rains?! Crawl back the way you came, and perhaps I shall pretend this trespass never existed! Defy me, and you—along with that brood of scaled vermin behind you—will enter but never leave. Your souls will be ground to powder and fed to Bonewither Cliff for fresh fertilizer!”
“Enter but never leave?” A faint curve tugged at Jared’s mouth, colder than iron in mid-winter. “Who gave you the courage to say that? This cracked shell protecting you? Or these trash? Truly hilarious.”
He wasted no more breath. Jared lifted his right hand, palm razor-still, and sliced downward like a judge ending all debate.
“Coall, break the barrier!”
“Sure! Leave that toy shield to me, I’ve hated the sight of it since we arrived!” Coall roared, a mountain-shaking dragon cry bursting from his chest.
The sound struck the Wailing Soul Barrier, making the ghost-lit membrane quiver like water beneath a hailstorm.
He hunched his bulk, an obsidian mountain brought to snarling life, while bolts of black light sparked across scale and sinew. Hundreds of streams of dragon’s power converged on him, tightening around his frame like armor forged of pure ruin.
Then, he lunged, arrow and avalanche in one. Carrying the weight of a falling primeval peak, he hurled himself at the thickest wall of that gray-black dome.
“Ten-Thousand-Soul Guard, Spirit-Devouring Rebound!” Elder Bonewick’s voice cracked with panic as he lashed the sceptre forward, forcing every thread of the grand array into one desperate knot.
Behind him, a dozen Heavenly Immortal elders thrust their palms out in unison, pumping their force into the array. The rushing power funneled through the Bone Sceptre, swarming toward the impact site in a last-second bulwark.
