“Chaos… Return to the Void, second stage… Origins Return…” Jared whispered the name as though afraid to wake it, then nudged the pearl forward with a touch gentler than a farewell.
The sphere traced a dull gray arc. It looked leisurely, almost slow-motion, yet in the blink that followed it was nose-to-nose with nine oncoming demon dragons and the forest of pale arms. Every watcher would spend a lifetime trying to forget what happened next, and fail!
The instant the pearl touched scale, time lost its grip. Breath, wind, sound, all paused mid-beat. The dragons froze mid-lunge, mouths fixed in permanent snarl, as if some unseen hand had pressed a finger to the world’s pulse. From each tail tip, decay began. Scales unraveled, muscle turned to dust, bodies peeling apart into raw motes of demonic vapor. There was no noise, only certainty—the sense that a higher rule had stepped in to correct an error, that these monsters were never meant to be here and were now being escorted home.
Roar!
The final protest tore out, already dissolving into nothingness before the echo could form. The nine demon dragons writhed in the torrent; ghost-blue fire jittered in their eyes as they howled. Every spasm only drew the chaos tighter, stripping scales, muscle, then shape. By the third heartbeat, they disintegrated into drifting black motes that the gale scattered.
Beyond them, the pallid arms that had clawed from the phantom Door of Reincarnation touched the same current. Skin hissed, bone steamed, and the limbs vanished like frost in noon sun. What hung behind was no vapor of water but strands of ashen mist—the Reincarnation Marks, soul-brands ripped clean. The scraps drifted a moment, then curved toward the Chaos Return-to-Void Pearl resting against Jared’s blood-slick palm. Each thread sank through its surface, the gem flared brighter, while the door’s phantom outline dimmed like a lantern starved of oil.
“No no no!” Morven’s scream tore through the storm, shrill enough to rattle Jared’s teeth. Jared watched the warlord’s crimson pupils bulge, then bleed. The nine dragons had been formed from Morven’s own divided soul; with each one extinguished, another rent opened inside him. Now nine wounds yawned at once. Black gore jetted from Morven’s eyes, ears, every pore, and the surrounding demon mist convulsed as his aura collapsed by a third.
Malcolm fared little better. The phantom Door was welded to his spirit; chaos gnawed along the link like a saw of ice and iron. Worse, as each Reincarnation Mark vanished into Jared’s pearl, Malcolm felt the lock he held over the Door slipping grain by grain. Panic flickered across his face—only the Lord of Reincarnation should wield that power. Why could this mortal?
Yet triumph tasted of rust on Jared’s tongue. Invoking the second stage of Chaos Origin, Return to the Void had felt like unhooking a dam; now the current rushed backward through him. Deep in his core, the newborn Origin Star dimmed by the breath, hairline cracks spidering across its surface. Pain followed each crack, bright and immediate, harder to swallow than any blade.
The pearl did not let him rest; it drank the shredded grudges and death-stench of a thousand ghosts, then forced the brew through his veins. Chaos suppressed the venom, but each turn of that alchemy burned stores of focus and Qi he could scarcely spare. Blood threaded from the corners of his mouth, his eyes, even the slight hollows of his ears, spotting the back of his hand.
The world reeled, but he clutched the pearl tighter, refusing to loosen his claim. He parted his lips, but the breath that scraped in felt like lava dragging across torn lungs. Every inhale seared, every exhale ripped deeper, as though his organs were being basted directly over flame. His right hand clamped around the Dragonslayer Sword, yet the blade still shivered because his knuckles could no longer hold steady. The split skin between thumb and forefinger gaped open, letting blood crawl down the hilt and drip from his wrist like rain.
The borrowed strength of Gerald and the others still hummed inside him, a scaffolding of foreign power propping up bones that should have collapsed. Even so, Morven and Malcolm’s combined blow had smashed into that makeshift frame, and the impact now rebounded inward, hunting for marrow and soul alike. His own life-force buckled under the ricochet, twisting against him like a dislocated joint. He had tempered this body in magma and thunder, yet the edges of his vision flickered, warning that even that durability now approached its limit. One more crack, and everything—muscle, will, breath—would shatter.
He ground molars against each other until iron taste filled his mouth; quitting remained the one luxury he refused to afford. Somewhere beneath the roaring pain, he remembered the simple truth: if he collapsed now, the last hope of this battlefield would crumple with him. Enduring a moment could redraw the entire war; failure would cement the slaughter already staining the ground.
A raw surge of defiance shot up his throat. “Now! Counterattack!”
The words tore free, shredded by pain, yet carried so sharply that even the far ridges seemed to echo them. The maelstrom he had unleashed still whipped across the field, but he kept a thin leash on it, herding the worst turbulence toward the Malevolent Path Hall line. His own allies staggered within the crosswinds, yet none were torn apart; that compromise had cost him more strength than the enemy would ever know.
Now, as his cry knifed through smoke, a wave of answering fury rose from every friendly throat, shaking the air and telling him he was not alone. Somewhere to his right, Blaine, slick with blood and missing an arm, bellowed, “Myriad Beast Valley disciples, tighten the circle! Slaughter the stragglers! Make the dead proud!”
The shout shook despite the gap at Blaine’s shoulder where an arm should have been; white bone glittered through the torn stump like quartz in dark earth. Blaine did not flinch, eyes burning a wet, furious red as he swung a slab of beastbone shaped into an axe larger than a door, hurling a guttural roar at the sky.
Beside him lumbered the Three-Headed Flame Lion King, each shoulder laced with clawed rifts; two of its three faces were half flayed, teeth grinning out of exposed skull. Yet the monster inhaled, and its triple throats released a blast so loud the air turned solid; dozens of Soul Hunters ahead clutched ears as blood spurted from eyes and nostrils. A second, shorter roar followed, raw and triumphant, hammering Jared‘s ribs like a drum.
Roused by the Lion King, more than five thousand surviving beasts answered in a single, thunderous cry and flooded forward, a living river aimed at the crumbling enemy ranks. He watched the surge; desperation had burned into mindless ferocity. No creature in that tide cared if its own veins emptied so long as teeth reached flesh.
At the spearpoint of the charge, hulking earth-scaled dragons hunched their armored spines and slammed into the Soul Hunters’ Soul-Seizing Grand Array like living battering rams. Each collision rattled the plateau—plates split, blood geysered—yet the dragons kept driving, tearing open a breach wide enough for the frenzy behind them. Sleek wolves, faster than thought, flickered through the gap as streaks of blue-green, scattering sparks when claws met enemy barriers. They no longer sought clean kills; instead, they shredded protective energy, snapped tendons, and left every victim screaming, a stumbling obstacle for the next predator.
Above, golden eagles with lightning still dancing on their wings stooped in silence, talons hooking into armor, bodies, anything, lifting prey skyward only to drop it into the chaos. For a heartbeat the sky seemed to weep bodies; the chorus of falling screams braided with the metallic stink rising from the ground.
