“Ten-Thousand Soul Devourer!” The Soul Devourer’s roar split the air. Behind him rose a colossal demon effigy woven from countless wailing souls. Its cavernous maw opened wide, ready to gulp down the river of swords.
Boom! Light and darkness collided again. The surge chewed at itself until both forces exploded, hurling the combatants apart. Blood streaked from the corners of their mouths as they tumbled backward through the void.
“Seems you never abandoned the Heaven Gate style,” the Soul Devourer sneered, wiping the crimson from his chin. “I kept enough to kill you…” Cold-eyed, Zevon flashed forward, hands weaving seals. “Starfall!”
Daylight dimmed as stars sparkled into existence. Spears of starlight punched through demon clouds, descending like a meteor storm toward the Soul Devourer.
“World-Devouring Demon Art!” he bellowed. Demon mist contracted into a bottomless vortex that swallowed the falling star-beams as fast as they landed.
They battled from sky to soil and back again, tearing reality wherever they went. Matter crumbled, and even the laws that held the world together unraveled in their wake.
The gate of Nethergate Sect cracked and crumbled under the titanic clash, entire slabs of earth sliding like broken plates across a trembling world.
The duel raged for a full day and night, until sun and moon were snuffed from the sky, rivers reversed, and it seemed level nine might be punched straight through.
Jared, Sylvia, and the few who still breathed braced themselves like boats in a hurricane, their hope reduced to a thin, quivering thread. Only now did they understand what true apex power meant.
At dawn of the second day, the sphere of annihilation swelled once more and detonated with a scream of ruin.
A twin burst, like lungs expelling the last breath of a dying world, thundered overhead.
Two figures plummeted like meteors, slamming into opposite horizons and plowing trenches several kilometers long before coming to a stop.
When the final gleam faded, their identities emerged.
At one end lay Zevon, kneeling in the groove’s farthest shadow. His robes hung in ribbons, skin flayed to bone, a single claw mark yawning across his chest. Black demonic aura coiled inside the wound, refusing every spark of healing.
His face was the color of dried parchment, his breath little more than a shiver. Even the crimson gourd at his hip was cracked like old glass.
Across the wasteland, the Soul Devourer fared no better. His obsidian armor lay in shards, one arm twisted grotesquely, bone jutting beneath torn flesh.
Scars left by sword energy and stellar burns latticed the demon’s torso, and a deep groove cleaved his brow, from which wisps of soul-light bled into the air. He hacked eruptions of black blood, his eyes still savage yet edged now with something unexpected—caution, even retreat.
The Soul Devourer rasped, “Zevon Swanson… To think a cast-off wretch could corner me to this degree. Today’s humiliation is etched in my marrow. When I recover, I will rip out your soul string by string and grind you through eternity…”
With a snarl, he clawed open the already-shredded fabric of space, flaring into a streak of onyx light that vanished beyond mortal sight. His venomous promise lingered above the rubble, like smoke that refused to blow away.
The Soul Devourer had fled.
Zevon staggered upright, intent on pursuit, but a fresh gout of blood splashed the dust. His legs buckled, and he collapsed where he stood. The wounds were simply too grave.
At last, the waves of destruction ebbed, leaving only a mutilated landscape and survivors who could barely believe they still lived.
Sunlight pierced the thinning clouds, bathing the ruins in a cold, after-cataclysm glare that offered no warmth, only the numb chill of survival.
The clash had torn both sides apart. Victory no longer mattered. Only ragged breathing and the reek of blood remained.
