“Draconians, hear me. Leave none alive!” With that final order, Jared cast judgment on the field. Roars shook the gorge. A single feral word followed. “Kill!”
Morale blazing, the Draconian army surged forward like a living tide, chasing the headless flock of enemies in every direction. The result was slaughter, pure and lopsided. Half an hour later, Nullrift Gorge lay silent, the ground wet and the air still.
The battlefield, so recently a boiling cauldron of steel, spellfire, and screams, stood eerily still. The copper-sweet reek of blood hung thick enough to taste. Bodies lay in grotesque ridges that rose like mountains against the haze.
Thousands of cultivators from the great orders of Level Nine had fallen. Only a handful, those quick to flee or blessed with rare escape talismans, had slipped away. The rest lay broken in the dust, paid in full for their defiance.
Pale sunlight speared through the drifting gore-mist and struck Jared, who stood at the summit of the carnage. Behind him, the Draconian army—armor cracked, limbs weary, yet eyes ablaze—glimmered red with the blood of their foes.
Jared’s Dragonslayer Sword still dripped, each ruby bead rolling down the dark steel like a ticking clock. His robes fluttered in a breeze that smelled of iron and ash, and the aura around him felt vaster, deeper, for every duel survived.
He let his gaze comb across the ruined plain. Nothing stirred; his eyes remained as calm as a midnight lake.
This battle had tested his own limits, proven the ability of his Draconians, and announced, to every corner of the Ninefold Heavens, that Jared Chance had arrived, carrying a sovereignty none would be allowed to violate.
From this moment on, Level Nine would reckon with a new, impossible-to-ignore power: Jared with his Beast-Subduing Tower and Draconian army.
“Mr. Chance, they barely put up a fight!” Coall kicked one last corpse aside, his grin split wide, tusk-white teeth flashing. “Next time, give me something that cracks my joints loose!”
Cyanna stepped to Jared’s side, lowering her voice. “We won, yes, but we have angered more than half of the Level Nine sects. Their revenge will come, for certain, and it will not come gently.”
Jared slid his sword back into its sheath and shrank the tower. “Let them come. If water rises, we build a dam; if soldiers march, we meet them head-on. We won’t seek trouble, but we will never run from it.”
He turned toward the blood-drenched Draconian ranks. “Sweep the field. Gather every spoil and divide it fairly. Then follow me, home, to Nethergate Sect!”
“Yes, sir!”
Hundreds of Draconians roared as one, their voices crashing into the clouds like thunder. They watched Jared’s retreating back with a devotion so fierce it bordered on worship.
This youth of royal dragon blood had freed them from endless shackles and led them to a victory that would be sung for ages. To follow him, they knew, was to gamble on the rebirth of their entire race.
Carrying slaughter’s chill and wagons of plunder, the Draconian host streamed from the crimson gorge, heading for the shadowed peaks that hid Nethergate Sect.
The moment news of this massacre broke, Level Nine would shudder. And the name Jared Chance would echo from realm to realm.
***
Meanwhile, at Nethergate Sect, in the Pentacarna Tower, Neville, Sylvia, and Zevon still hovered in trance, knitting spirit and flesh back together.
Outside the gate, the usual drifting mists of Nethergate had been burned away by raw slaughter.
At the foot of the peak, hundreds clashed with no thought for life or limb. Light and gleam tangled; explosions, howls, and death cries rolled without pause. The air quivered under every shockwave, and the once-smooth ground was now a cratered quilt of scorch marks and pooled blood.
Under Rowena’s command, the sect’s disciples held a ragged defensive ring, weakening by the heartbeat, trying to stem the tide of black-robed assailants that kept pouring toward the heights.
Every defender understood one brutal truth. Somewhere beyond the smoke-choked courtyard, deep within the tower, the sect’s pillars—Neville, Sylvia, and the badly wounded Zevon—were clinging to a fragile moment of recovery that would decide Nethergate’s future.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be allowed to reach them. The tower itself was a priceless relic of the Nethergate Sect. To let such a treasure fall into enemy hands was unthinkable.
“Hold the line for the sect leader and for the Nethergate Sect!” Rowena’s raw scream ripped through the cacophony. Her spear blurred into a storm of black steel and wailing spirits, each thrust shrieking with spectral fury as it beat back one attacker after another.
