Oswald felt the air catch in his chest; heat rose through the cold as he drew breath past blood-flecked teeth.
“Heavenly Sword Pavilion disciples, heed me. Nine Heavens Sword Array! Slay the fiends, purge the wicked! If the swords live, we live; if the swords die, we die!”
The shout left his throat like shattered ice, yet beneath the chill he felt magma pushing upward, hungry for daylight. For years discipline had been his skin; now rage peeled it away, and the world narrowed to red mist and moving targets. The battered iron sword in his grip no longer remembered its original color; layer after layer of enemy blood had dried to a dull garnet crust. Fine cracks webbed the blade, souvenirs from his last clash with Morven, but when he tested the edge it still whispered of death.
A wall of voices surged behind him, nine hundred throats fused into one resolve: “If the swords live, we live! If the swords die, we die!”
Order dissolved into lethal flexibility; trios and quints peeled away, each forging a pocket-sized Demon-Slaying Sword Array meant to cut like surgical steel. Every flash of metal produced a bloom of scarlet, brief and obscene against the storm-gray sky. Heavenly Sword Pavilion had always prized offense, but with death already accepted, the cultivators fought as though the next heartbeat was theft. A single thrust often ended with steel buried between brows; a downward arc sent heads spinning free—clean, unquestioning finality.
Across the shattered plain another roar rose, rough with desperation. “Five-Element Sect disciples, seal the heavens, crush all sorcery! Today, we fight until none remain!”
Oswald recognized Aurelian’s normally silken tone; now it scraped like stone on stone, every syllable soaked in resolve. The sect master bit through his own tongue; three spurts of vital blood splattered the nexus stone that anchored their barrier. Light erupted—five hues braided together, searing Oswald’s retinas even through blinking tears.
The once-flickering dome steadied, then ballooned outward, swallowing more of the Malevolent Path Hall ranks in prismatic walls. Inside that cage, elemental law thickened until every breath tasted of metal, sap, brine, smoke, and loam all at once. Blades, spears, and chains of pure alloy corkscrewed through the air, converging on foes like a grinding whirlwind. Emerald vines erupted, lashing ankles and wrists, their thorns sweating a numbness that crawled toward the heart. A tidal wall slammed forward; beneath the churn waited countless ice lances poised to skewer anything dragged under. Overhead, towers of flame blossomed, each petal veined with runic sparks that detonated on contact. Ground buckled and subsided, forming pits that swallowed legions while jagged ridges rose like instant tombstones.
With the three great sects now weaving carnage beside Jared’s reality-rending strike, the battle’s tide snapped the other way. He watched the coalition’s front line falter; their eyes wide, blades trembling—fear had replaced every promise they had marched in with. The ancient opportunists who had pledged loyalty scattered first, vanishing behind smoke and spatial tears, loyalty dissolving faster than their dreams of eternal life.
Jared felt the soil beneath the ruins pulse, as if hollow. The realization landed with a cold thud: Witherbone Demon must have laced the ground with those disgusting Bone-Burrowing Passages long before today. A brittle crack tore the air; half of Witherbone Demon’s skeleton burst into pale shrapnel. The shards drilled downward faster than worms fleeing daylight, leaving only a sour aftersmell where his torso had been.
A wet suction snap yanked Jared’s gaze aside. Great Elder Bloodsea clamped a disciple in each fist, their faces collapsed as crimson threads spiraled from skin to his greedy lungs. Satiated, he blurred into a razor line of red and shot beyond the horizon. Terror spread like spilled oil. The remaining recluses abandoned pretense; one dissolved into wind, another blew apart a treasure for cover, a third torched his own years and fled on forbidden wings.
Without their elders, the field scattered like monkeys from a felled tree. Within the span of a dozen breaths, more than half of Malevolent Path Hall’s fighters were gone. The coalition had marched in over twenty thousand strong. Now fewer than ten thousand dragged wounded bodies through churned mud, courage leached from every eye.
Relief barely formed before the world twitched. Boom!
The detonation roared from the field’s exact center, too vast to belong to mortal hands. The Chaos Return-to-Void Pearl in Jared’s grip quivered like a heart about to arrest. An unseen hammer slammed him sideways. He careened hundreds of yards before smashing into the ground, blood spraying in hot arcs from his mouth. He had forced the pearl to gorge on too many Reincarnation Marks and toxins; now the strain screamed through its core.
Hairline cracks webbed across its shell, each fissure glowing with harsh ash-gray light. Then the pearl came apart. Raw chaos erupted, a flood without banks. It was not an attack, merely power that had lost every chain. Whatever the torrent touched—stone, spirit, space—shredded into first principles. A ten-mile circle vanished as though erased by an invisible thumb. Hundreds of duelists inside that ring left no bodies, no ash, not even a rumor of being. The ground was shaved thirty feet lower, exposing charred basalt. Air tore free, birthing a brief, glassy vacuum. Twisted light jittered through the void, painting it with wrong colors.
Puh…
Blood clawed up Jared’s throat. He slammed into a mountainside; granite buckled, forming a Jared-shaped cavity nine yards deep. He dragged himself free, every movement making his bones creak like rotten timbers. He felt his chest tear wider with every breath; the wound had grown to the size of a spread hand, raw bone glinting through shredded flesh. The skin along the edges had turned a ghastly ash, the leftover chaotic force nibbling at each living cell like cold, patient fire. Blood streamed out in steady ribbons, soaking his right side until it clung to him like a second, crimson robe.
Deeper still, everything lay smashed and misplaced—organs shoved aside, channels ripped, the faint light of his Origin Star cracked and flickering toward blackout. The reserve of chaotic celestial energy that once buoyed him now sputtered like a lamp in rain; even hovering in the air was beyond him.
“Jared, my young friend!” Gerald’s roar battered his ears, dragging his fogging thoughts back to the battlefield.
Beyond the blur of his lashes, Jared caught Malcolm’s charcoal silhouette locking Gerald in place, twin blades of shadow stitching the elder to the fight. Even wounded, Malcolm moved with vicious certainty; compared to Jared, the man looked almost whole, each step pulsing with lethal intent.
“Morven, do not let him breathe! If the boy survives today, he will gut us tomorrow!” Malcolm barked, murderous resolve splashing from his eyes.
Morven wiped black blood from his lips, his midnight pupils boiling with the same hunger. The annihilation of his nine life-bound demon dragons had ripped through his soul, leaving his cultivation sagging by nearly a third. Only Jared’s death could balance that scale. The thought rang in Morven’s skull with the clarity of a prayer.
