Lorel stared, her gaze as sharp as the edge she would need to survive. She remembered Stonewatch with painful clarity: the crushing density of his **General's Shield**, the explosive power it gave his short-range attacks. Her **Jingdao** was not the strongest. Her path to victory was distance, precision, and the creation his shield could not simply overpower.
The fight began without ceremony. Kang Hao released his **Jingdao**. The air around him didn't just shimmer; it congealed. A visible, shell-like layer of shimmering, bronze-gold energy formed over his skin—not a glow, but a second, denser epidermis. The **General's Shield**. Its pressure was a physical weight pushing against the spectators.
In the crowd, Juxian's eyes narrowed in analysis. *The Jingdao of the General's Shield,* he thought. *Born from a legend of a general who held a mountain pass alone, taking ten thousand blows upon his body to buy his king a single day. It is not a technique of attack, but of absolute, stubborn endurance that turns the body into a fortress. To break it, you must break the will of the mountain.*
Kang Hao moved. He was not a blur, but a force. He crossed the ten paces in two heavy, ground-shaking steps and threw a straight punch. It wasn't fast by elite standards, but it carried impossible weight, the air screaming as it parted.
Lorel's own **Jingdao** flared, a softer gold-white. She didn't block. She sidestepped at the last instant, her left hand slapping against his wrist in a flowing redirection, using his own momentum to pivot herself to his side. It was a clean, economical move.
But Kang was already adapting. His forward momentum became a spinning, devastating low kick. Lorel crossed her arms, reinforcing them, and parried.
***THUD.***
The impact was like being hit by a falling tree. She was knocked skidding backward, her boots scraping sparks from the stone, her arms screaming with numbness. She raised her right hand, fingers splayed, summoning the focus to create the **Supremacy Sword**.
Kang Hao was too smart, and this was a death match. He cared nothing for decorum. He wouldn't let her create it. He didn't chase her. He spun forward and drove his shielded fist into the arena floor.
***BOOM-CRACK!***
The reinforced stone didn't just crack; it *erupted*. A wave of shattered rock and focused kinetic energy shot towards Lorel like a localized earthquake. Spikes of stone thrust up in its wake.
Lorel leapt forward and to the side, using a pulse of **Jingdao** in her legs to clear the worst of it. She landed lightly.
But Kang was already there, having used the eruption as a screen. He was behind her. His palm, sheathed in the dense bronze light, slammed into her left shoulder blade.
Lorel's face darkened with pain. It was the same feeling from Stonewatch—the inescapable, crushing pressure. The **General's Shield** was designed to absorb and counter force. Pushing against it was futile.
In that instant of crushing agony, she remembered. She remembered the lesson bought with blood.
She didn't push. She *released*.
The gold-white light of her **Jingdao** winked out. The solid pressure of her reinforcement vanished.
For a fraction of a second, Kang's palm met unresisting cloth and flesh instead of opposing force. His grip, calibrated to counter her power, met empty air. It slipped, just enough.
Between her and his chest, in the space created by her yielding, the **Unbound Lantern** bloomed. Not the gentle orb of before, but a violent, immediate star of pink light, born from her desperation.
She let it go.
It was a point-blank detonation. A silent, concussive ***THOOM*** of unraveling force.
Kang Hao was blasted backward off his feet. He skidded on his back across the arena, leaving a smoldering trail, coming to a stop at the very edge. He pushed himself up. His **General's Shield** flickered but held. His bare chest and arms were scorched with light burns, the skin red and angry, but the damage was superficial. He grinned through the smoke rising from his skin.
"The same trick," he rasped, "will not work twice."
He dropped into a new stance. His body lowered, his hands touching the stone. Then he moved on all fours, his motion becoming unnervingly fluid and insectile. The change was grotesque, but effective. He was *faster*, scuttling across the arena with terrifying, unpredictable speed.
But that fleeting moment where he'd been blown back had given Lorel the time she needed. Her left shoulder throbbed, the joint heavy and nearly useless. Her good right hand extended. **Zhidow** energy, drawn from her core, spun into being. The **Supremacy Sword**, a beam of solid, humming pink light, solidified in her grip. She held it awkwardly, forced to use her dominant but wounded arm.
Kang Hao scuttled in, a zig-zag blur. Lorel lifted the sword in a desperate slash. He didn't try to block with his shield. He dove *under* the arc of light, sliding on his knees in a move that defied his size. Because her stance was off, her swing a fraction too high.
His fist, a hammer of condensed **Jingdao**, drove up into her stomach.
***CRUNCH.***
The sound was sickeningly wet. All air left Lorel's lungs in a silent gasp. She was lifted an inch off the ground by the uppercut's force.
Before she could fall, his other hand shot out. It closed around her throat.
He hoisted her into the air, holding her aloft like a hunter displaying his kill. Her feet kicked weakly. The **Supremacy Sword** dissolved from her limp fingers. His eyes, full of disdain and a brutal, performative arrogance, swept over the crowd—lingering on Gen, on Liang, on all the elites. This was his statement. This was the price of their earlier scrutiny.
"LOREL!" Chubbs's roar was pure anguish. He lunged forward, but an invisible, shimmering barrier snapped into existence around the arena's rim, throwing him back. The Tower's law was absolute. No intervention.
Gen's hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides, his jaw a hard line. He watched the struggling figure, a cold anger boiling in his chest, helpless behind the barrier.
Lorel's vision swam. Dark spots danced at the edges. The crushing pressure on her windpipe was absolute. She could barely draw a shred of air. Kicking her legs against nothing, she felt a cold, primal fear seize her—the fear she had conquered in the forest, now returning tenfold. *I might actually die.* The thought was a clean, terrifying shock.
But beneath the fear, deeper, was a desperate, clawing will. The sheer, animal need to *live*. It burned away the paralysis.
From the edge of the arena, the last Kang family cultivator, the one coiled in a ball, spoke. His voice was a broken monotone, carrying in the awful silence.
"We were ten… the best of our Kang generation. The real elites. He led us. He wasn't satisfied with Infants. We found a Bug-Type Milky Beast, feeding on things like the Icy Crown Spider. We beat it. It was still an Infant." The man shuddered. "But he wasn't satisfied. He tortured it. Over and over. He forced its evolution… a forced growth."
He looked at Kang Hao's back with undiluted horror. "It changed. Grew wings. A humanoid bug. Even incomplete… it slaughtered us. Only he fought it. He was beaten… broken… but he killed it before it became a full Adult." The man hugged himself. "Without him… we would all be forgotten bones in this Tower. He saved us… by making monsters."
The crowd digested the story with dawning horror. Kang Hao hadn't just fought an Adult Beast; he had *created* a proto-Adult through torture and then slain it in its agonized, empowered state. In terms of raw, brutal power, he was a peer to those who had fought the False Deity. Perhaps stronger.
In Lorel's dimming world, the words filtered through as distant noise. Her lungs were fire. Her thoughts fragmented. *Can't… break… his grip…*
The lesson of Stonewatch echoed. *Don't fight the force. Yield. Or… change the battlefield.*
If she could not break free with the force of her body… she would stop trying.
She stopped struggling. She went limp in his grip, conserving the last dregs of her energy, her focus turning inward, to the well of her spirit where **Zhidow** resided.
She gave up on breaking his grip. She gave herself to creation.
Her hands, hanging limp at her sides, twitched. Then, they moved. Not to pry at his fingers, but to weave in the air before her.
From the empty space around her, beams of pink light *manifested*. Not one. Seven. Each a perfect, humming **Supremacy Sword**, woven from nothing by her final, defiant will. They materialized in a fan behind her back, points aimed at the man holding her.
Her eyes, glazed with lack of air, suddenly blazed with focused light.
The seven swords shot forward.
Kang Hao's triumphant smirk vanished. He had not expected an attack from a woman he was choking to death. He flung her aside and threw himself backward, his **General's Shield** flaring to its maximum density.
He was fast, but not fast enough. One of the seven beams of light, moving with the speed of thought, pierced through the edge of his shielding and his raised forearm, tearing a grisly, cauterized hole clean through the muscle of his shoulder. He landed in a crouch, a hiss of pain escaping his lips, his left arm now hanging uselessly.
Lorel hit the ground in a heap, gasping, coughing, drawing in huge, ragged breaths of precious air. She pushed herself up to her knees, her body trembling violently, but her eyes were clear and blazing.
Kang Hao looked from the smoking hole in his shoulder to her, and a slow, terrifying smile spread across his face. The pain seemed to excite him.
"Now," he breathed, "it starts."
The bronze-gold light of the **General's Shield** around him began to churn and change. It condensed over his back, folding, compressing, and then *extruding* outward. It formed into four jagged, translucent wings of solidified **Jingdao** energy that sprouted from his shoulder blades—crude, bug-like, and humming with violent power. The energy shed its orderly, defensive nature. It became something predatory and alien.
This was no longer the shield of a loyal general. This was the **Face of the Dead**, the **Jingdao of the Bug Monarch**—the perverse power he had wrestled from the dying, forced evolution of a monster. It was a technique born of torture and survival, and he aimed it all at Lorel.