Jared’s spiritual sense fanned across the chaotic battlefield. Even here, where time and space fought each other, he clamped onto the creature’s unique energy signature and refused to let go.
Wherever the silhouette shifted, the sword was already there, blocking, parrying, or striking along the very path the silhouette thought would be safe.
Sword light and pitch-black force kept ramming one another, detonating into feverish bursts of color that rippled across the silent firmament like outlaw fireworks.
For the moment, the fight hung in a deadlock, yet Jared felt the shadow’s presence thinning, slowly, inexorably, like dusk draining out of a valley.
His own reserves were bleeding fast, but the deep foundation of the Human Immortal Realm braced him. Instead of fading, his battle lust only climbed higher.
He threw back his head and loosed a roar that shook the void. The Dragonslayer Sword flared, and a golden arc hundreds of yards long gathered above the blade, chiseled from pure intent to sever stars and shatter every law of nature.
Swinging with both hands, he hurled that blade of will toward the shadow’s refuge. The stroke siphoned nearly one-third of his spiritual power, his single greatest release since advancing to Human Immortal Realm Level Two.
Even before the slash arrived, its crushing pressure froze space-time in that quadrant, locking the shadow in place with nowhere to run.
Sensing death, the silhouette’s twin crimson eyes flashed in a panic. It stopped dodging. All the darkness around it shrank into a fist-sized sphere that dripped annihilation.
With a shriek like tearing steel, it shoved the orb straight at the oncoming sword aura. This was a collision without retreat, without mercy.
Boom!
Language failed. Gold and black writhed together, corroded one another, then burst into a swelling globe of raw power that swallowed both combatants whole.
The flash outshone nearby stars, shockwaves vaporized drifting meteoroids as though they had never been.
The instant his cut landed, Jared rallied the last of his energy into a body-wide shield and summoned the hazy phantom of Pentacarna Tower at his back to absorb the blast.
Even so, the wave flung him thousands of meters before he clawed himself to a halt, blood surging, complexion ghost-white. He fixed his gaze on the roiling core of the explosion, refusing to blink.
Time lost meaning. At last, the ruinous glare ebbed away.
Where the shadow had floated, nothing remained—only ragged, unstable space and fading flakes of black embers that crumbled into nothing.
The fiend had been forced to withdraw, or perhaps the golden strike had shattered its condensed core beyond repair.
Jared hovered amid the starlight, chest heaving. The Dragonslayer Sword’s glow dimmed to an ember. His brow furrowed, relief refused to come.
That shadow had appeared without warning and vanished just as abruptly, never showing its true face, never speaking a single word. Its origin and goal were a riddle swallowed by night.
Who sent it?
The Malevolent Path Hall? Some other power I offended without knowing?
Unease pooled inside him, the road ahead felt strewn with unseen snares. He dared not linger. A second attacker, or a second wave, might already be on its way.
Steadying the turmoil in his veins, he raised the Dragonslayer Sword once more, tore open a relatively stable seam in the surrounding void, and stepped into the swirling, kaleidoscopic tunnel that led toward level eight.
Behind him, the fractured battlefield and its dying shockwaves whispered of a brief yet ferocious skirmish that almost rewrote the stars.
