Chapter 104: The Clash of the Gods and the Blind Leap
The instant Kael Morningstar extracted the Star Dragon Root from its millennial stone bed, the ecosystem of the Thunder Rift Valley suffered a cardiac arrest.
The spiritual anchor that had maintained the balance of the storm for centuries disappeared. The silence that flooded the deep cavern was not a relief; it was the vacuum that precedes the detonation of a supernova. Kael tossed the radiant root into his spatial ring and spun on his heels. His golden eyes opened wide as he felt the approaching pressure.
Outside, in the canyon, the slaughter stopped dead.
The Rift Leviathan, a black sapphire abomination at Stage 1 of the Semi-Saint Realm, crushed three war rhinos under its weight and raised its eyeless head toward the cavern. It didn't need to see. Its sensitivity to Qi currents warned it that the heart of its nest had been excised.
A roar of a frequency so deep that it cracked the limestone for kilometers around emanated from its jaws. The Leviathan completely ignored the Heavenly Sword Sect disciples stabbing it, ignored the corrosive poison of the Alchemy Pavilion, and the axe blows of the Iron Fang barbarians.
All the monster's attention locked onto the mouth of the cavern where the six Pillars stood.
Its immense crystal horn began to glow. It wasn't attracting a single lightning bolt; it was absorbing the electricity of the entire storm into a single point, compressing the plasma until the air around it turned incandescent white.
—"Violeta, get us out of here!" —Kael roared, his voice nearly drowned out by the deafening hum of static.
Violeta, pale as a corpse, clasped her hands together. Her single blue eye blinked frantically as blood began to drip from her nose and her empty socket. She was trying to force a massive [Bridge Between Worlds], capable of transporting six people at once, under the geological pressure of the mountain and the magnetic interference of a Semi-Saint.
—"Gravity is collapsing the tunnel!" —Violeta screamed, her silver veins bulging on her face, threatening to burst—. "I need ten seconds! Ten uninterrupted seconds or the portal will tear us in half!"
Ten seconds. Facing the charged attack of a Semi-Saint, ten seconds equated to an eternity.
—"Turtle formation!" —Bren bellowed.
The giant of the Iron Mountain stepped between Violeta and the cavern entrance. He sank his boots into the rock, activating [Core Anchoring] to one hundred percent. His muscles swelled until they tore the seams of his armor, and his skin took on the texture of dark lead. He drove his basilisk-scale shield into the ground. He was willing to melt before yielding a millimeter.
At his side, Eris released the [Ruin Flame] in both arms. The white-cored black fire formed an entropic barrier in front of Bren's shield.
—"It's not going to be enough!" —Eris shouted, watching how the light from the Leviathan's horn melted the rock outside the cave with just its radiation—. "That thing is going to vaporize us!"
From a stalagmite on the cave ceiling, Varian drew his femur bow until the fibers seemed about to snap. His yellow pupils locked onto the beast's glowing horn.
—"I'll break its focus! [Arrow of Inevitable Judgment]."
Varian fired three radiant void arrows in rapid succession. The beams of light crossed the distance and pierced the outer layer of energy of the monster's horn, detonating in micro-explosions of wind.
The Leviathan roared in annoyance. Varian's arrows didn't seriously hurt it, but they destabilized the plasma for a fraction of a second.
It was enough to buy a second. Nine remained.
The beast opened its jaws and fired.
A torrent of hyper-concentrated plasma, a laser of pure annihilation, swept the cave entrance. Eris's black fire barrier clashed against the plasma. The entropic decomposition struggled to devour the raw energy, but the difference in realms was insurmountable. The black fire retreated, crushed against Bren's shield. The steel of the shield began to glow red-hot. Bren spat blood, his bones crunching horribly.
They were going to die. All tactical calculations were reduced to ashes in the face of absolute force.
But then, the abyss responded.
The shadow cast by Kael's body, which had remained unusually cold for hours, boiled.
It was not an optical illusion. A puddle of dense darkness, like ink spilled on a canvas, expanded across the cavern floor.
In silence, ten figures emerged from the blackness.
They were two-dimensional silhouettes, human shapes without volume, cut from the very fabric of the night. They wore smooth, white porcelain masks, devoid of any facial features, save for a single violet rune etched on the forehead: Silence.
Kael and Eris opened their eyes in astonishment.
They were Malak's Silent Shadows. But they weren't the Origin Realm assassins who cleaned up scum. These were ten select specters, entities infused with the personal essence of the Sovereign of the Scythe. Each of them exuded an unstable and artificial, yet undeniable aura: lower Semi-Saint.
They did not look at Kael. They made no sound. Their existence was a tool, and their current purpose was martyrdom.
The ten Silent Shadows lunged toward the mouth of the cavern, gliding like oil slicks over the melted rock. They threw themselves directly into the column of plasma the Leviathan was firing.
It was a brutal and calculated sacrifice.
The first Shadow collided with the plasma laser. Instantly, its two-dimensional body burst into white flames, but instead of evaporating, it activated a dark implosion technique that sucked away a massive portion of the beast's energy before being completely eradicated.
The second Shadow used the remains of the first as a bridge, leaping through the beam and driving two poisoned daggers carrying a death aura directly into the Leviathan's blind lower eyelid.
The monster roared, the spiritual pain from Malak's daggers forcing it to divert its attack. The plasma beam sliced through the cavern ceiling instead of the floor, bringing down tons of molten rock.
Eight seconds.
The remaining Shadows did not stop. They knew they couldn't kill an abomination that outclassed them in mass and bloodline, but they could bleed its time. They split up, flickering through the visual distortion, slashing the Leviathan's tendons, injecting paralyzing venom into its scales, and letting themselves be annihilated by the beast's claws just to block its energy cannons.
The porcelain masks melted under the heat, their black paper bodies turning to ash, but not a single scream escaped them.
Seven seconds.
—"Don't stop! Keep the cover up!" —Kael roared, refusing to let the specters' sacrifice be in vain. He positioned himself next to Bren, pushing the Whisper of the North against the giant's shield to help withstand the pressure of the rockslide falling upon them.
While hell consumed the valley floor, a nightmare of biblical proportions was about to erupt in the sky.
Thousands of meters above the massacre, hidden in the thickness of the purple clouds and ozone hurricanes, two higher existences had been watching.
They were Supreme Elders. Local gods.
One wore immaculate silver robes, his aura so sharp it cut the lightning before it touched him. It was the Ancestor of the Heavenly Sword Sect.
Beside him, wrapped in a toxic green mist that withered the water in the clouds, floated the Ancestor of the Alchemy Pavilion.
Both were at Stage 1 of the True Saint Realm.
They had allowed their heirs, Jian and Lysa, to fight the Leviathan as a trial by fire, ready to intervene only if the beast proved impossible to subdue. The Star Dragon Root was their guaranteed loot; they were merely deciding which of the two would keep it in the end.
But the instant Kael extracted the root and placed it in his spatial ring, the cosmic connection of the treasure vanished from the two Saints' senses.
The Heavenly Sword Ancestor opened his eyes, his zen calm replaced by a murderous fury that made the atmosphere tremble.
—"Some miserable insects have taken the treasure right from under our noses!" —his voice was a thunderclap that overpowered the storm—. "They are in the cave! Annihilate them and retrieve the Root!"
The Alchemist Ancestor grunted, his hands condensing spheres of poison capable of melting an entire city.
Both gods dive-bombed toward the valley, willing to flatten the entire mountain just to crush the thieves.
But halfway down their descent, the purple sky ceased to exist.
It wasn't that it grew dark; light itself was murdered. A stain of absolute blackness—cold, devoid of hope and mercy—expanded at an astronomical speed, covering the valley like a shroud. The [Veil of the Eclipse] in its ultimate expression of power.
The two Ancestors stopped dead in mid-air, their survival instincts screaming in unison.
In front of them, blocking the path to the canyon, the darkness condensed.
Malak, the Sovereign of the Shadow, manifested in his true glory. He was no longer a silent specter; he was a hurricane of jet-black smoke, a hundred meters tall, twisting like an ocean of boiling pitch. Beneath the immense hood woven from dead stardust, two orbs of crimson jack-o'-lantern fire glared at the Alliance gods with the contempt of a gravedigger inspecting fresh corpses.
In his skeletal hands, he held the Soul Harvester, a scythe of petrified wood and obsidian crystal as large as a skyscraper. The hundreds of thousands of distorted faces trapped in its blade began to scream in unison.
The Heavenly Sword Ancestor paled, unsheathing a sword that radiated divine light.
—"Who are you, heretic?" —he demanded, trying to hide the terror produced by his opponent's aura of pure death—. "Step out of our path or be erased!"
Malak had no vocal cords, but his voice resonated directly in the minds of the two Saints—an icy whisper that made their souls tremble.
—"Your domains end where my Patriarch's shadow begins."
Without further ado, Malak attacked.
There were no feints. He raised the immense scythe and traced a horizontal cut that spanned the entire firmament. [Harvest of the Purgatory].
The Sword Ancestor unleashed a slash of heavenly light a thousand meters long, and the Alchemist hurled a rain of toxic meteorites.
The clash of the three True Saint laws—Death, Sword, and Poison—in mid-air was apocalyptic.
There was no sound in the first millisecond; space itself cracked, unable to process the energy. Then, a circular shockwave swept the sky. The purple clouds were eradicated within a fifty-kilometer radius. Starlight was seen over the Rift Valley for the first time in centuries.
The force of the clash pressed downward. The tectonic plates of the canyon groaned. The walls of the abyss began to crumble. Rocks the size of castles began to rain down on the battle still raging at the bottom of the valley.
General Fang, Jian, and Lysa looked up, paralyzed by terror. They saw the three gods clash repeatedly, the black scythe colliding against light and poison, unleashing auroras of destruction.
They understood, with bitter clarity, that in this war, they were merely ants.
Inside the cavern, time had run out.
The shockwave from the Saints' clash in the sky slammed into the mountain. The cave ceiling began to give way catastrophically.
Malak's ten Silent Shadows had fulfilled their mission. The last of them was disintegrated by a plasma-charged swipe from the Rift Leviathan, but their sacrifice had stalled the beast just enough.
Three seconds. Two seconds.
—"I've got it!" —Violeta screamed, spitting dark blood.
In front of her, space didn't open delicately; it tore violently. A portal with jagged edges, vibrating with violet, black, and platinum colors, pulsed chaotically. It wasn't a stable tunnel. It was a scar in reality.
—"The coordinates are broken!" —Violeta warned, falling to her knees, supported by Elara—. "The pressure of the Saints above shattered my compass! If we jump, I don't know where we'll land!"
Kael looked back. The Leviathan, its face bloodied by the shadows, was charging its final plasma cannon, aiming directly at the collapsing cavern. Above, tons of rock were half a second away from crushing them.
There was no choice. Fall into the abyss of space or be erased from existence.
—"It doesn't matter! Jump!" —Kael ordered.
Elara pushed Violeta into the portal and jumped after her. Varian dropped from the collapsing ceiling straight into the vortex. Eris fired a final flare of ruin into the beast's blind eyes and dove into the rift.
Bren withdrew his shield, his torn muscles bleeding profusely, and threw himself into the dimensional abyss.
Kael was the last.
The instant his boots left the stone floor to enter the chaos of the [Bridge Between Worlds], the Leviathan fired its plasma beam. At the same time, a fragment of the mountain, sheared off by the Saints' clash in the sky, collapsed onto the cavern.
The cave entrance was vaporized. The stone turned into liquid glass and then subatomic dust.
Violeta's portal collapsed and slammed shut with a dull snap, a fraction of a second before annihilation consumed the spot where the six Pillars had stood.
The Thunder Rift Valley was reduced to a burning crater. The Guardian Beast howled in frustration. The troops of the Heavenly Sword Sect, Alchemy Pavilion, and Iron Fang were buried under the rubble or crushed by panic.
And high above, the Sovereign of the Scythe retreated, merging back into the [Veil of the Eclipse]. His mission wasn't to kill the two Saints; it was to buy time. With the heirs safe in the dimensional flow, Malak disappeared into the abyss of shadows, leaving the two Alliance gods screaming curses at the empty sky—with no Root, no thieves, and no glory.
Far away, in the absolute nothingness between dimensions, the Golden Generation had escaped the mortal war, only to be cast into the infinite whim of the cosmos. The heist was over. True survival had just begun.